https://www.localstack.cloud/ emulates a bunch of the aws services, perfect for local testing.

You cant re-use an old connector, you’ll have to crimp on a new one. It may or may not be worth buying the tool/ends depending on the length of the cable.

You can buy a cable crimper and a bag of the ends on Amazon, prob for $20-$40, but if it’s just one small patch cable you’re trying to fix, you can probably buy that for $5.

I ran Ethernet through my whole house and outside for cameras, so it was worth it to me to buy the tools and spools of cable.

I’m still a fan of synology because it does a lot of what you want out of the box without you needing to constantly manage and setup all these services from scratch. I’ve upgraded through several synology units over the years, currently using a 6TBx8 unit for much of what you mention. Since drives are so big these days, you could get a newer 4bay with more horsepower and just drop a couple 20TB drives in it as a mirrored pair then in the future add more drives as needed. Dropping to 2 drives cuts your power consumption a bit, and staying with a 4 bay instead of something bigger will also keep the power down.

You can absolutely build your own, but synology comes with all the “home cloud” apps preconfigured and your time and effort is worth something too. I build enterprise cloud environments for a living and I don’t want to have to do that at home on my free time- synology is so plug’n’play.

Nice about the NIC- I’m still on gigabit in the house which is fine- 100ish MBps is fast enough that copying a movie or something is still just a minute or two, but my NAS supports a 10Gb expansion card- I might upgrade one day. I don’t know how much speed I get get through my CAT 6- I haven’t tested above gigabit speeds. Really though I don’t need my LAN to be substantially faster than my internet, so gigabit is fine for the next few years I think.

Is this cable service? Cable often shares capacity with people on your “block” so when everyone is uploading, your upload suffers. I had real trouble with cable a few years ago where intermittently my upload would throttle so hard that tcp acks would fail to send and my download would tank too. FIOS was the best thing that every happened to my internet!