# 🏙️ Data Center

This is a brief aside because I found some cool technology and wanted to remember it. This wasn't really as much about building a physical data center as it was about managing a virtual data center. In relation to my research around CDNs I was thinking about how I would deal with managing physical servers, and maybe even letting people run compute on them. While looking at solutions, I realized there's a whole market of data center management software. It's pretty obvious when you think about it, but whatever. Some of those offerings are:

• https://www.openstack.org/
• https://harvesterhci.io/
• https://maas.io/
• https://www.proxmox.com/en/

All of those solutions solve slightly different problems and have different licensing/pricing models. Openstack is what got me really excited, but after reading reviews about it the general consensus seems to be it's a nightmare to maintain and the documentation they have available is miserable.

Harvester looks really cool, but it actually runs on top of kubernetes, which is a nightmare I'm not ready to repeat. Proxmox is pretty popular and many people use it for managing homelabs, but it's closed source and pretty expensive.

MAAS was the last provider I looked at and probably the most likely one I would use if I decided to pursue this path. I wasn't able to find too much online discourse about it, but canonical is reputable, their docs seemed good and they have a shit load of functionality. I played around with the idea of grabbing some bare metal and trying it out. I was already familiar with some bare metal hosting providers and Equinix was my favorite. However when looking at pricing, their bare metal hosting is more expensive (?!) than comparable Droplets at Digital Ocean. I always thought we were paying extra for using a VPS, but unless you physical own the bare metal you're running on it seems to even out in this case. So I'll put a pin in this unless I can find some far cheaper bare metal.