Being a noob and all I was wondering whats the real benefit of having a monolithic lets say proxmox instance with router, DNS, VPN but also home asssistant and NAS functionalitiy all in one server? I always thought dedicated devices are simpler to maintain or replace and some services are also more critical than others I guess?
Yeah, definitely go with a single machine for containers if you haven’t seen a need for disaggregation. Even a cheap Aliexpress N100 box is super capable.
Regarding the jump to Kubernetes, I will point out that Kubernetes is a tool for container orchestration and automation, not necessarily a container cluster. I have found many benefits from using Kubernetes on a single node, so I wouldn’t consider container clustering a prerequisite for Kubernetes.