I have one and it still sucks. I ordered it after the one I bought on Amazon kind of sucked thinking the L1T would be better and it was worse than the Amazon one.
I've worked with quite a few ISPs and exchanges. I haven't set up port mirrors for the NSA but I have setup temporary mirrors for the FBI upon request.
IaaS is mostly like this already. There are some things where it’s not used like VMs which serverless tries to solve. Additionally people tend to waste tons of resources with IaaS because they don’t scale on usage.
My solution to this has been creating a public bastion server and use Wireguard. Wireguard listens on a random UDP port (port knocking is more difficult here.) This client is set up to have a dynamic endpoint so I don't need to worry about whitelisting. The key and port information are stored in a password manager like Vaultwarden with the appropriate documentation to connect. Firewall rules are set to reject on all other ports and it doesn't respond to ICMP packets either. A lot of that is security through obscurity but I found this to be a good balance of security and practicality.
If you’re not using any splitters and zero to a few couplers you can expect latency to be ~3ms with the model OP is using. You can easily achieve 1Gbps using NFS with 3-10ms of latency as long as the underlying hardware can support it. I would avoid doing block storage even over ethernet though, that should be reserved for DAC or fiber. These particular adapters are rated for 10W (5V/2A) and I doubt they use all of that. I haven’t seen any noticeable latency spikes using these either but your mileage will vary depending on your cabling and connections (especially older pre-digital cable splitters.)
Nice setup! I have a very similar Homelab minus the Generac (I regret not getting one before inflation kicked in, especially since I already have LNG to the home.)
My only recommendation would be switching your virtualization over to Proxmox (LXC / KVM) and setting up an HA cluster with Ceph and MLAG. It's relatively easy and free and will give you a lot more features than plain ESXi and even free vSphere/vCenter.
The support will get better over time. 10 years ago I couldn't watch any streaming services on Linux with Firefox or Chrome. There was a brief period where streaming services were still using flash so you could sideload the flash player onto Firefox but that didn't last long. Now I run Pop!_OS 22.04 with an Nvidia GPU and I can play almost all my DRM content including Windows games on Steam. While I still experience awful bugs that I wouldn't have otherwise experienced on Windows or macOS I can finally daily Linux desktop.
I don't see this as an attempt to kill off their self-hosted offering. They charge the same as their SaaS version with some slight differences in features/limits (limits being removed as they're offloaded to your infrastructure.) The self-hosted version should in theory have a better profit margin than their SaaS version. Seems like the Gitlab Dedicated offering is probably just their self-hosted version automated and hosted on Gitlab infrastructure. Appears the demand was there and it probably wasn't much extra work to make it happen so why not.
I mean at $35/user month it better include SSO. That's insanely expensive for the limited scope of this service. I'd rather buy Jetbrains at $32.45/mo (after annual and 3 years of membership) and get a full suite of IDEs including remote pair programming that's compatible on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
I honestly feel like starting a WISP is risky right now. Companies like Starlink and T-Mobile have the money and infrastructure to compete and solve a lot of problems that WISPs have.