Gemini capsule
https://gemini.arenzana.org
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89 lines
3.5 KiB
89 lines
3.5 KiB
# 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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