Self-hosting..

So this blog…whats it running on?

Well the obvious choice is to host in the cloud of course, but where’s the fun in that? I run this on a single node K8S cluster made up from a old Lenovo thinkcentre micro picked up for less that £100 (quad core i3, 16GB ram and 500GB SSD). It’s run off a dedicated UPS with around 3hours run-time as it only draws 11w at idle, costing me far less than the equivalent in AWS EC2.

I built the cluster from a tool of my old employer, Replicated, called Kurl which is an automated cluster builder allowing you to select the components and deploy it within seconds. I went for OpenEBS as my storage CSI of choice with a local pv provisioner and snapshot class. It runs a multitude of things including this blog, Portainer agents, budget management apps, media file sharing…even an online Super Mario (use arrow keys plus S key) or Pacman game in a container. All accessed via an Nginx reverse proxy ingress.

Backups are handled by Kasten ,who just happens to be my current employer, straight to AWS S3 for DR protection.

All this is pushed through a 1Gb/s cable link via a secure firewall.