I&#x27;ve been doing a lot of distributed computing work over the past year, so nowadays when I get home my side project thoughts look like this:<p>- I want my own mesos cluster.
- I wonder if I should use apache aurora or chronos for scheduled jobs in our next release? I want to install both and take a look.
- I&#x27;d love to check out spark streaming off of a kafka topic.
- etc.<p>What&#x27;s a cost effective way to have a personal cluster (big enough to really apply distributed techniques in a meaningful way, maybe ~10 nodes)? The most obvious solution is to use digitalocean or aws and only spin up instances when I use it. But I&#x27;d actually rather spend more money upfront ($1000-3000) to just have an always on cluster that I can keep going and not think about spinning up&#x2F;down. Could I just buy a few servers with alot of ram&#x2F;cpu and then put VM&#x27;s on them, effectively giving me more instances to use? I could also go the google route, which is buy <i>more</i> commodity hardware at a bargain instead of fewer higher powered servers.<p>I&#x27;m rambling at this point - any input would be appreciated!
Ask HN: Cluster for side projects