I recently decided I wanted to start cutting third-party cloud services out of my life. I purchased a shiny Raspberry Pi 400 (which reminded me of the Amiga computers of my youth) and decided to try Nextcloud on it as a personal cloud. It was a far quicker process than I expected thanks to the awesome NextCloudPi project. Within twenty minutes, I had a running Nextcloud instance. However, I could only access it locally on my internal network, and accessing it externally is complicated if you don’t have a static IP address, or use dynamic DNS on a router that supports it.
There are of course myriad ways to solve these problems (and NextCloudPi offers convenient solutions to many of them), but I was also interested in how Kubernetes might handle some of the work for me. Of course, this can mean I am using cloud providers of a different kind, but I would have portability, and with a combination of an Ingress and Service Mesh, could move my hosting around as I wanted.