Vernon Miller, a senior software engineer at Grafana, shares his journey of setting up a homelab cluster to enhance his understanding of Kubernetes and Grafana Mimir. Transitioning from private clouds and on-prem infrastructure to public cloud services, he found Kubernetes particularly challenging. To bridge the gap between local development and cloud clusters, he created a physical multi-node cluster, named "beehive," using Beelink Mini PCs instead of the originally planned Raspberry Pi. This setup allowed him to experiment and learn by repeatedly breaking and fixing things. Through this process, he installed a k3s cluster, configured Prometheus and Grafana Mimir using Helm charts, and utilized his TrueNAS server for storage. Although faced with challenges like memory limitations and configuration complexities, Miller gained valuable insights into the operational aspects and scalability of Grafana Mimir, ultimately finding the experience both educational and enjoyable.