TJCloud

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

Key Technologies

I’m 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 I’ve 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.