After the first day of setting up my cluster, I thought I had it all figured out: Starlink was up, the batteries were humming, and the dashboard showed green across the board. The ocean stretched endlessly out front, the servers stacked neatly beside me — a beautiful balance of nature and compute.

But technology has a way of humbling you.

By the second day, the batteries had dipped lower than I expected, reminding me that a few busy hours of replication jobs and Starlink’s constant draw can chew through power faster than coffee disappears on a cold morning. I found myself rationing uptime like firewood — deciding which nodes to leave running, which services to pause, and whether a quick benchmark was worth shaving another hour off the battery.

The network dropouts came next. Starlink doesn’t always care that you’re in the middle of a cluster heartbeat — satellites switch, clouds roll in, and suddenly half your services think the world has ended. I had to tune timeouts and remind myself this wasn’t a datacenter; it was a little band of machines trying their best while gulls wheeled overhead.

Yet, there was something magical about these limitations. Each hiccup became a reminder of place. The blinking LED on a node felt less like an alert and more like a lighthouse keeping watch. Every decision about what to run and what to power down made me think carefully about what really mattered.

That night, sitting on the deck, the ocean dark and restless below, I watched a Grafana dashboard glow against the dusk. My cluster was alive, but in a way that felt deeply connected to its environment: finite, adaptive, a little imperfect.

And maybe that’s the point. Edge computing at the summer house wasn’t about proving raw horsepower — it was about showing that technology can share space with the natural world, even on its terms.