diff --git a/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/kubectl-deploy-elfhosted.md b/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/kubectl-deploy-elfhosted.md index e5f1c0e..668ae49 100644 --- a/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/kubectl-deploy-elfhosted.md +++ b/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/kubectl-deploy-elfhosted.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ categories: - note tags: - elfhosted -title: Introducing the ElfHosted experiment +title: Kubectl deploy ElfHosted description: Every journey has a beginning. This is the beginning of the ElfHosted journey --- @@ -61,18 +61,18 @@ Our original appbox platform invested in a custom user dashboard, which handled: 1. Account setup and payment 2. App install/uninstall/restart -This ended up being a big investment, and an ongoing source of frustration[^1]. Since we want to iterate ElfHosted quickly, we need an "off-the-shelf" billing system which will "just work". I looked into Shopify, Woocommerce, and several other open-source billing systems. +This ended up being a big investment, and an ongoing source of frustration[^1]. Since we want to iterate ElfHosted quickly, we need an "off-the-shelf" billing system which will "*just work*". I looked into Shopify, Woocommerce, and several other open-source billing systems. -My philosophy here is that I want as little as possible to do with billing - it's soul-sucking, anti-fun to debug why customer **X** was charged **$Y** instead of **$Z** :rage:! +My philosophy here is that I want as little as possible to do with billing - it's soul-sucking, anti-fun to debug why customer **X** was charged **\$Y** instead of **\$Z** :rage:! I settled on the pragmatic approach of using [Woocommerce](https://woocommerce.com/marketplace-sale/) on Wordpress. It's extensible enough for the customization I'll need for service provision, but it's polished / supported enough to handle all the weird edge cases a billing system needs. I paid for the Subscriptions and Bundles addons, after doing some rudimentary testing to confirm that I could get a webhook sent on a user creation / subscription event. -### SSO +### Single Sign On (SSO) One of the killer features of the appbox service was our ability to secure otherwise-insecure applications (*[Gatus](https://github.com/TwiN/gatus), for example*) behind a layer of authentication, in this case driven by Traefik Forward Auth and Auth0. I needed to replace the Auth0 integration with _something_, and in the spirit of quick iteration, I discovered two Wordpress plugins which will allow Wordpress to act as a OIDC authentication server (*sign in with Wordpress*): * [This one](https://wordpress.org/plugins/miniorange-oauth-20-server/), which is highly polished but the free version is intended to upsell you to an expensive paid version -*[ This other one](https://wordpress.org/plugins/openid-connect-server/), which is very bare-bones, and requires editing Wordpress's config to get it going. +* [This other one](https://wordpress.org/plugins/openid-connect-server/), which is very bare-bones, and requires editing Wordpress's config to get it going. Again, in the interests of expediency, I'm starting with the polished-but-naggy extension! diff --git a/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/prologue.md b/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/prologue.md deleted file mode 100644 index e5f1c0e..0000000 --- a/docs/blog/posts/notes/elfhosted/prologue.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,87 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2023-06-08 -categories: - - note -tags: - - elfhosted -title: Introducing the ElfHosted experiment -description: Every journey has a beginning. This is the beginning of the ElfHosted journey ---- - -# Introduction to ElfHosted - -I've consulted on the building and operation of an "appbox" platform over the past 2 year, and my client/partner has made the difficult decision to shut the platform down, partly due to increased datacenter power costs, and capital constraints. - -So I've got two year's worth of hard-earned lessons and ideas re how to build a GitOps-powered app hosting platform, and a generous and loyal userbase - I don't want to lose either, and I've enjoyed the process of building out the platform, so I thought I'd document the process by setting up ***another** platform, on a smaller scale (*but able to accommodate growth*). - - - ---8<-- "what-is-elfhosted.md" - -## The Big Picture - -### Infrastructure - -We'll use Kubernetes. Obviously. :grinning: - -But where to get the infrastructure? The appbox hardware was all owned, which was big capital outlay, and while it was fun to drive a big, grunty compute and ceph cluster with redundant 40Gbps network (*for the Ceph nodes*), 10Gbps local and internet connectivity, the power / physical management of the infrascture turned out to be our undoing. - -My first thought was to pursue managed Kubernetes clusters, but I was quickly priced out. Next I considered bare-metal managed Kubernetes providers (*servers.com, for example*), but couldn't find something appropriately customizable, resilent, and affordable. - -I was directed towards Hetzner's [Server Auction](https://www.hetzner.com/sb), and I found my groove... Hetzner sell older servers at a discount, and based on RAM/CPU, they're simply the most affordable option. The downside is that Hetzner's dedicated server products are very much a "hands-off" arrangement - no magic cloud infrastructure, no elastic block storage, and no managed Kubernetes. - -Since managing bare-metal Kubernetes platforms is **literally** my [day job](https://www.funkypenguin.co.nz/work-with-me/), I decided to commit, and ordered a small 64GB 4-core machine as a controller, and a slightly gruntier 12-core, 128GB machine as an initial worker. - -=== "Controller" - - ``` - 1 x Dedicated Root Server "Server Auction" - * Intel Core i7-7700 - * 2x SSD M.2 NVMe 512 GB - * 4x RAM 16384 MB DDR4 - * NIC 1 Gbit Intel I219-LM - * Location: Germany, FSN1 - ``` - -=== "Worker" - - ``` - 1 x Dedicated Root Server "Server Auction" - * Intel Core i9-9900K - * 2x SSD M.2 NVMe 1 TB - * 4x RAM 32768 MB DDR4 - * NIC 1 Gbit Intel I219-LM - * Location: Germany, FSN1 - ``` - -### Billing System - -Our original appbox platform invested in a custom user dashboard, which handled: - -1. Account setup and payment -2. App install/uninstall/restart - -This ended up being a big investment, and an ongoing source of frustration[^1]. Since we want to iterate ElfHosted quickly, we need an "off-the-shelf" billing system which will "just work". I looked into Shopify, Woocommerce, and several other open-source billing systems. - -My philosophy here is that I want as little as possible to do with billing - it's soul-sucking, anti-fun to debug why customer **X** was charged **$Y** instead of **$Z** :rage:! - -I settled on the pragmatic approach of using [Woocommerce](https://woocommerce.com/marketplace-sale/) on Wordpress. It's extensible enough for the customization I'll need for service provision, but it's polished / supported enough to handle all the weird edge cases a billing system needs. I paid for the Subscriptions and Bundles addons, after doing some rudimentary testing to confirm that I could get a webhook sent on a user creation / subscription event. - -### SSO - -One of the killer features of the appbox service was our ability to secure otherwise-insecure applications (*[Gatus](https://github.com/TwiN/gatus), for example*) behind a layer of authentication, in this case driven by Traefik Forward Auth and Auth0. I needed to replace the Auth0 integration with _something_, and in the spirit of quick iteration, I discovered two Wordpress plugins which will allow Wordpress to act as a OIDC authentication server (*sign in with Wordpress*): - -* [This one](https://wordpress.org/plugins/miniorange-oauth-20-server/), which is highly polished but the free version is intended to upsell you to an expensive paid version -*[ This other one](https://wordpress.org/plugins/openid-connect-server/), which is very bare-bones, and requires editing Wordpress's config to get it going. - -Again, in the interests of expediency, I'm starting with the polished-but-naggy extension! - -## Summary - ---8<-- "what-is-elfhosted.md" - -There are lots more ideas to explore, and problems to solve, but solving billing, infrastructure, and SSO means that the idea "has legs", so let's keep building and testing! - ---8<-- "blog-footer.md" - -[^1]: Adding products was laborious, and it'd do weird things like cancel subscriptions when an auto-renewal was cancelled, intsead of at the end of the subscription period! \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/docs/elfhosted/index.md b/docs/elfhosted/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5e6d883 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/elfhosted/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +# Introducing "Elf Hosted" + +Do you enjoy tinkering with Docker, Kubernetes, and self-hosting, but there are some things you want to "Just Work(tm)"? That's what Elf Hosted is about - combining out extensive (*and growing!*) collection of recipes with the Kubernetes / GitOps-managed architecture, and making them available in a well-packaged, automated, gitops, continuouly-delivered bundle! diff --git a/scripts/build-insiders.sh b/scripts/build-insiders.sh index 3aa9f38..5318651 100755 --- a/scripts/build-insiders.sh +++ b/scripts/build-insiders.sh @@ -1,3 +1,4 @@ #!/bin/bash -docker build --build-arg FROM_SOURCE=ghcr.io/geek-cookbook/mkdocs-material-insiders . -t funkypenguin/mkdocs-material --platform amd64 +docker pull ghcr.io/geek-cookbook/mkdocs-material-insiders +docker build --build-arg FROM_SOURCE=ghcr.io/geek-cookbook/mkdocs-material-insiders . -t funkypenguin/mkdocs-material docker run --rm --name mkdocs-material -v ${PWD}:/docs funkypenguin/mkdocs-material build -f mkdocs-insiders.yml diff --git a/scripts/serve-insiders.sh b/scripts/serve-insiders.sh index d0f5953..e75f750 100755 --- a/scripts/serve-insiders.sh +++ b/scripts/serve-insiders.sh @@ -4,4 +4,4 @@ docker build --build-arg FROM_SOURCE=ghcr.io/geek-cookbook/mkdocs-material-insid docker run --rm --name mkdocs-material -it -p 8123:8000 -v ${PWD}:/docs -e PROD_BUILD=false funkypenguin/mkdocs-material-insiders serve \ --dev-addr 0.0.0.0:8000 \ --dirtyreload \ - --config-file mkdocs-insiders.yml + --config-file mkdocs-insiders.yml \ No newline at end of file