- Cases are overrated. You may not need them. Corkboard is underrated. Just make sure you keep your hardware clean from dust and debris.
- Have you found a mobo? Due to the existence of APUs (I assume), there doesn't really exist many AM4 mobos with iGPU. You have the Asrock RACK boards, which are great (I operate a few) but maybe over budget if you're on a shoestring. You may not need a GPU at all but then you prob want an APU or dGPU on hand for troubleshooting and potentially flashing (not all mobos and firmware versions boot headlessly from what I hear)
- General rule of thumb: if youre going to use something for prod, buy at least 2 of each. It's great to have an extra for experiments and you'll be grateful in case of hardware failure.
- in case you plan to run your host OS straight on the metal (as opposed to VMs): It's recommended to separate your control plane from your workers. Use Pis or similar for this; whatever you can find cheap.
- Rather than HN, I highly recommend you check out ServeTheHome (forums/blog/yt). Lots of great stuff there. The "tinyminimicro" (that would be the small dell/lenovo/HP units other commenters mention) and ali-router-board tracks can be worth considering as well. You should be able to get good ideas about switches here too, maybe even score something on the trade board if you live in US or EU.
- Screw AWS. You should be able to run the money numbers on that yourself.
- Have you found a mobo? Due to the existence of APUs (I assume), there doesn't really exist many AM4 mobos with iGPU. You have the Asrock RACK boards, which are great (I operate a few) but maybe over budget if you're on a shoestring. You may not need a GPU at all but then you prob want an APU or dGPU on hand for troubleshooting and potentially flashing (not all mobos and firmware versions boot headlessly from what I hear)
- General rule of thumb: if youre going to use something for prod, buy at least 2 of each. It's great to have an extra for experiments and you'll be grateful in case of hardware failure.
- in case you plan to run your host OS straight on the metal (as opposed to VMs): It's recommended to separate your control plane from your workers. Use Pis or similar for this; whatever you can find cheap.
- Rather than HN, I highly recommend you check out ServeTheHome (forums/blog/yt). Lots of great stuff there. The "tinyminimicro" (that would be the small dell/lenovo/HP units other commenters mention) and ali-router-board tracks can be worth considering as well. You should be able to get good ideas about switches here too, maybe even score something on the trade board if you live in US or EU.
- Screw AWS. You should be able to run the money numbers on that yourself.