TJCloud

This is my personal cloud - for hobby programming, personal projects, and experiments.

Key Technologies

Im leaning on the following core technologies:

• Terraform (and Terraform
  Cloud or Github
  Actions) for provisioning
  infrastructure as code
• Kubernetes for orchestrating various
  workloads
• NGINX Ingress for
  exposing web services to the web from the cluster
• DigitalOcean as my
  main Kubernetes provider, while using block storage container storage
  interface for persistent storage.
• Cloudflare for DNS, TLS, and origin
  server protection.
• Cloudflare
  Access for
  zero-trust access
• GitHub Packages as my main
  image registry.

Previous Technologies

These are tech that Ive retired from my personal cloud:

• Linode, due to an ominous acquisition by Akamai
  and a price increase despite no feature parity with
  DigitalOcean to which I have moved.
  • Linode Kubernetes
    Engine, a simple,
    developer-friendly, and inexpensive cloud provider for managed
    Kubernetes, and
  • Linode Object
    Storage for
    storing data files
• Self-hosted stack for user management and authentication of itnernal
  services, replaced by Cloudflare
  Access
  • Keycloak for identity and access
    management
  • OAuth2 Proxy as main
    gateway to protect private services
• Self-hosted stack for image building, replaced by GitHub
  Actions
  • Kaniko for
    building images inside a Kubernetes cluster

Applications

I host the following applications:

• my personal coding and writing environment from
  code-server that allows me to
  develop on the cloud, with any device (including iPads and
  chromebooks!). Some additional mods features are:
  • Protected domains (https://\<port>.<domain>) to test web apps
    running on the server or for exposing environments like Jupyter or
    Pluto
  • Custom web fonts through an NGINX sub_filter
  • Python, Julia, JS, and R installations for the confused data person

Disabled Applications

The code is still in the repo, but is no longer in active use:

• PGAdmin, an excellent open source
  administration console for PostgreSQL
• Mastodon - my own personal Mastodon server
  for interacting with the Fediverse (open source Twitter but less
  annoying virality and more useful, insightful content)
• FreshRSS - feed reading service, I read using
  Reeder on iOS and Mac.
• Kill the Newsletter -
  A self-hosted, secure version of Kill the
  Newsletter for managing newsletters
  and feeding them into FreshRSS.
• PostgreSQL for my main database
• Clickhouse as a requirement for Plausible
  Analytics, storing clickstream data
• Redis as a requirement for Mastodon, but also for
  general caching in the development server
• Plausible Analytics for hosting
  privacy-friendly website analytics
• the Kubernetes Dashboard
  for administering the cluster, and
  metrics-server
  for collecting data to present in the dashboard.