Add first elfhosting blog post

Signed-off-by: David Young <davidy@funkypenguin.co.nz>
2025-12-12 17:26:19 +00:00 · 2023-06-15 23:40:52 +12:00
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+---
+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*).
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+--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!