Welcome to my parcella of the web. I am Max, going by the online nickname "DrGlitch" for quite some time now. I haven't really put up a lot of content to this place, but spent most of the time on the more technical things instead. I've finally found an idea what to write about! How I've set up the infrastructure and technical components for this site, because that was the initial motivation anyway: exploring modern web development, but with hosting and operating everything myself.
With cloud service emerging from the 2000s, the web has become a little less open, more complex, and more centralized. At the core of that centralization are the big cloud providers, which offer, at the core, two main benefits to their customers: scalability and the removal of operational burden. Given their mixed track record of security, availability and privacy, it is still a viable option for companies to run their systems even purely on public cloud infrastructure, as a whole organizational aspect - hardware operations - is off the table when with a cloud hoster. The cloud providers' competition are skilled DevOps engineers and developers who would be responsible for buying, installing, operating and maintaining hardware - at a given service level. The cloud providers' competition are skilled DevOps engineers and developers who would be responsible for buying, installing, operating and maintaining hardware - at a given service level. Most cloud providers offer a wide range of services, from virtual machines to managed databases, to serverless functions. They may offer object storage, SQL and NoSQL databases, backup, managed application hosting, and many more. They offer their brand of golden cage. It is in their economic interest to keep their customers in their ecosystem, and they have no motivation to help them leave. For this project, I have decided to go the OSS way instead. Mostly in order to have a reference system in place that is following DevOps best practices (automate everything, infrastructure as code) and is easily compatible with every combination of cloud-hosted VMs and containers, as well as baremetal hardware. At the core, it should showcase that modern web technology does not need to rely on a cloud provider's services. Portability, vendor neutrality and cloud native compatibility are amongst the goals of this project. Wherever reasonably possible, I want to provide the source code and configuration of the components employed here. See the Tech page for more details on the technology stack used.