Building a Production-Grade DevOps Homelab on 4GB Ram HP Stream PC

After months of procrastination, I finally started building my home lab. Day 1 was all about establishing the foundation: organizing the project structure, setting up Docker Compose, and deploying a complete monitoring stack with Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana. The Hardware Reality Check I started with an HP Stream (4GB RAM), but quickly realized it wasn't going to cut it. Container operations were painfully slow—startup times exceeded 2-3 minutes, and the system was constantly swapping memory. After struggling for a bit, I switched to my main PC with 8GB RAM and a stronger processor. The difference was immediate and dramatic. What took minutes now took seconds. Lesson learned: Hardware constraints directly impact your development velocity. Don't underestimate the importance of adequate resources when building infrastructure. Day 1 Project Structure Before jumping into Docker, I organized the project directory to ensure scalability and maintainability. Here's what I created: My