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90 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
90 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext
# Artisanal Web Hosting
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# Summary
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I have an operations background. My first company taught me most of
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what I know about how to run software and server
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operations. Fast-forward 15 years and we are now all about the cloud,
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VPSs, and Kubernetes. I love [the cloud]. Up until a few weeks ago, my
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blog has been hosted at [Scaleway], which has worked great for
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me. Today I run it on my own server where (for better or for worse)
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everything is managed by me.
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=> https://arenzana.org/2019/04/blogging-with-org-mode/ the cloud
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=> http://scaleway.com/ Scaleway
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# Why
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One thing I was not happy about was Google Analytics. To keep my
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uptime I want to know the number of page loads and system load in
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order to optimize and scale. I know, I should probably be using a CDN
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to mitigate some of these issues, but I don't feel I'm there just
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yet. Google Analytics is one of those services that is not known to be
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privacy friendly, and if you are here, I respect you and your time. I
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don't include ads and I try to keep the tracking as limited as
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possible disabling social crap, etc. For my purposes, I don't need
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Google analytics. A web server logs all of the information I need for
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scaling purposes. All I needed was to access those logs (which I
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already had access to) and store the data in a database, create a
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dashboard, and kiss Google Analytics goodbye.
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I know, I could've used AWS or Google Cloud to do this; but the cost
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over time would have been prohibitive. Self-hosting seems like the
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right answer at the moment.
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The game plan:
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* With the help of my company, I got a new server and some data
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center space (power, networking, and a rack). I know, this is the
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most tricky part as not everyone works for a telco that can provide
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these things. The point of this post is not to justify the
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financial advantage of self-hosting vs the cloud, but to point out
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the elements we overlook by leaving it up to the cloud to do some
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of the heavy lifting.
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* I installed ESXi on the server to run all my infrastructure. I have
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done this before, so I felt fairly comfortable reproducing this.
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* I used VyOS for all the networking and firewall needs. This was the
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trickiest part. I hate networking. I still do and the networking
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concepts, to be honest, just beat me. Somehow though, with basic
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subnetting and routing skills, you can actually get surprisingly
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far.
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* I used [Terraform] to define all my (CentOS 7) infrastructure and
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[Ansible] to automate/standarize the configuration of every element
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in my little cloud.
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* NGINX to host my site (quite straight forward).
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* Run an Elastic stack (really, just [Beats], [Elasticsearch], and
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[Kibana]) for data processing. From system auditing, to security,
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log parsing, and metrics. This stack is the central unit that gives
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me visibility into what's happening inside my system. This includes
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NGINX log analysis.
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=> https://www.terraform.io/ Terraform
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=> https://www.ansible.com/ Ansible
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=> https://www.elastic.co/products/beats Beats
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=> https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch Elasticsearch
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=> https://www.elastic.co/products/kibana Kibana
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# tl;dr
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Over the next few weeks I'll be writing about my experience _moving
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away from the cloud_. The work it involved, where I believe it's
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better than the cloud, and where I believe the cloud is superior. I
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will talk about what's left in my set up and how I'm planning on
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tackling it.
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They say the journey is as important as the destination itself and, in
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this case, I must agree. I have learned a lot through the
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process. Perhaps someone will learn something from my experience. That
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will make it all worth it!
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