This weekend I packed up my little cluster, Starlink kit, and a few deep-cycle batteries, and headed out to my father’s summer house by the Atlantic. The house sits on a quiet bluff, where the ocean stretches endlessly and the salt air seeps into everything. It’s the perfect place to disconnect… or, in my case, to experiment with running a cluster entirely off-grid.

There’s something surreal about sitting on a wooden deck, laptop balanced on a railing, hearing gulls overhead while monitoring Ceph replication or watching a Proxmox dashboard update in real time. Starlink’s dish hummed to life beside me, drawing more watts than I’d like to admit, but locking onto satellites and giving me connectivity in the middle of nowhere.

Of course, batteries don’t last forever. The cluster’s hum, the Starlink’s hungry power draw, and the occasional extra load from replication jobs all reminded me that out here, power is the real currency. Each percentage point ticked down carefully monitored, each process balanced between “must-have” and “nice-to-have.”

And yet — it worked.

There’s a strange joy in knowing the same workloads that demand racks and conditioned datacenter air can also run while you sip coffee overlooking the Atlantic. Sure, the latency spiked, the batteries drained faster than planned, and I had to shuffle priorities between compute and comfort — but the experiment proved that the edge isn’t always about harsh necessity. Sometimes it’s about blending technology with the places that matter most.