I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.
Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?
No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now thereās nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.
But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol
In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night... If you're not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you're doing it wrong.
No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They're not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule
I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you're focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it's more akin to closing chrome when you're not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.
Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.