gemini/20190628-artisanal-hosting.gmi

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