#infrastructure

I had Portainer running but it made figuring things out harder, not easier. And there was no single place to just click a link and open a service. I described the problem to Claude Code and it built me exactly what I needed.

I put the Nexus backend under four progressively harder k6 load tests — smoke, stress, spike, and soak — while watching every CPU cycle and megabyte on Polaris. 300 concurrent users, zero failures, 40% CPU headroom. Here's what a NUC can actually handle.

The last post ended with Polaris's role shifting to embeddings and batch work. What actually happened was more interesting — it became a proper personal server in a single afternoon. nginx, WireGuard, Docker, GitLab Runners, and a weekly AI-powered security audit.

I bought a NUC to run local LLMs and escape API costs. Then I tested local, free cloud, and paid cloud against the same prompts. The result wasn't 'pay for inference' or 'run it yourself' — it was that 'fast and free' isn't a quadrant that exists right now, and that has implications for anyone planning a personal AI setup.