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My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

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Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#111

Post by tluyben2 »

kstenerud wrote: post #104

This is definitely cool, but it also highlights a huge problem we have with software nowadays. There are 19 stacks in this repository. 19 pieces of software that require their own maintenance, JUST TO RUN YOUR APPLICATIONS! The amount of extra work required just to host the software that views your pictures, plays your videos, and allows chat with people is absolutely insane. I'm not talking about this particular rep…

I could post my fully automated self hosting infrastructure, but it would be boring. Few bash ssh scripts and LEPP stack. None of this complexity and yet 10+ years uptime. Interesting nonetheless but think i'll pass on this. I have done these setups at cloudproviders for clients; that is definitely the risk averse version; if something goes wrong every month with AWS, it's just 'ok'; if something goes wrong every 5 years with your non-cloud, it's panic & heads need to roll (even though it costs a fraction).

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#112

Post by midasuni »

kstenerud wrote: post #107
legends2k wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it how the general software philosophy is? A composition of decoupled, do-one-thing-well pieces working together to achieve a larger task?

Yes, but after the initial monoliths of mainframes, we had a golden era of operating systems, where all of the plumbing and infrastructure to run your applications was maintained by someone else (Microsoft, Apple, Commodore, Atari, SGI, Sun, Palm, Redhat, etc). Now we've come full circle back to the bad old days where you need an entire team of dedicated people and arcane knowledge just to run your application softwa…

Apt install your lamp stack

Deploy your files

Cronjob to apt upgrade every night

Why does that need a full team? Or more than 10 minutes every few years?

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#113

Post by rawoke083600 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #111
kstenerud wrote: post #104

This is definitely cool, but it also highlights a huge problem we have with software nowadays. There are 19 stacks in this repository. 19 pieces of software that require their own maintenance, JUST TO RUN YOUR APPLICATIONS! The amount of extra work required just to host the software that views your pictures, plays your videos, and allows chat with people is absolutely insane. I'm not talking about this particular rep…

I could post my fully automated self hosting infrastructure, but it would be boring. Few bash ssh scripts and LEPP stack. None of this complexity and yet 10+ years uptime. Interesting nonetheless but think i'll pass on this. I have done these setups at cloudproviders for clients; that is definitely the risk averse version; if something goes wrong every month with AWS, it's just 'ok'; if something goes wrong every 5 y…

Yup ! This I've used bash+ssh for the last 10 years for my solo founder and commercial products. Is sexy or even nice ? Absolutely not, but damn its simple and most Linux semi professionals can understand it with a glance.

Bash as infrastructure+maintenance is almost like SQL for data.

Everyone agrees is not fantastic, many have tried to improve and yet SQL + BASH is still around chunking along doing their unsexy things just good enough :)

Never underestimate software that is 'just good enough' :)

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#114

Post by INTPenis »

kstenerud wrote: post #104

This is definitely cool, but it also highlights a huge problem we have with software nowadays. There are 19 stacks in this repository. 19 pieces of software that require their own maintenance, JUST TO RUN YOUR APPLICATIONS! The amount of extra work required just to host the software that views your pictures, plays your videos, and allows chat with people is absolutely insane. I'm not talking about this particular rep…

Most of that is kubernetes, which is completely unnecessary for self hosting purposes. It's mostly for learning, or for the convenience of hosting multiple different services, trying many different containerized applications.

If your only goal is to serve Nextcloud, Plex or whatever to your family, you can get away with much less than that.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#115

Post by jmakov »

khuedoan wrote: post #47

Repo owner here, I just created this account, I'm a long time HN lurker. I was surprised to find this on Hacker News, I wanted to wait until the stable release before posting on HN, but thank you for posting :) This project is still in alpha stage, but please feel free to critique; I'd appreciate it. Edit 1: After reading some of the comments, I want to clarify a few things: - Because it is currently in the alpha sta…

Thanks for the project! Once deployed, how do you keep everything up to date?

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#116

Post by throwaway894345 »

akkartik wrote: post #76
throwaway894345 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. There’s not much of an economical argument for self-hosting—if you’re doing it, it’s almost implied that you’re doing it for fun. Although having run a small (but really scaleable c/o k8s) homelab for <$2/month, I’m not sure I’d save much effort versus using some PaaS or cloud provider now that I know what I’m doing. Like I’d need a real load balancer and a few other things so we’re talking < ~$100/month to…

I still believe :) I'm looking not for an economic argument but for a strategic one. I think[1] a self-hosted setup with minimal dependencies can be more resilient than a conventional one, whether with a vendor or self-hosted. https://sandstorm.io got a lot right. I wish they'd paid more attention to upgrade burdens. [1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Fine, take my upvotes. :)

In all seriousness, that’s an interesting perspective that I hadn’t considered.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#117

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

cyfex wrote: post #102

I always found the hurdle with self-hosting to be maintaining, not the initial setup. Things like upgrading, in order to keep getting security fixes, and verifying everything works after the upgrade, are what has taken the most effort and time in the past for me. This looks like a great setup by the author, but difficult to maintain in the long run without significant time investment.

True, it's not easy. In the past I used to run everything on Debian stable for that reason. And after every two years or so, I'd book two days for the upgrade, with some time offline.

The problem was, at some point Debian stable got so distant from modern infrastructure you had to patch it from the beginning with newer versions, so reluctantly I switched to testing (that was years ago). I was surprised to find out things were working just fine.

The problem is today everybody distributes software in their own way. Especially web software - native packages are more and more rare. So automatic updates that work are indeed a challenge.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#118

Post by dgellow »

kstenerud wrote: post #104

This is definitely cool, but it also highlights a huge problem we have with software nowadays. There are 19 stacks in this repository. 19 pieces of software that require their own maintenance, JUST TO RUN YOUR APPLICATIONS! The amount of extra work required just to host the software that views your pictures, plays your videos, and allows chat with people is absolutely insane. I'm not talking about this particular rep…

You don’t need all of this for a home server, the author is just having fun.

Systemd units and a bit of sh is enough if you just want your applications.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#119

Post by tiarafawn »

kstenerud wrote: post #104

This is definitely cool, but it also highlights a huge problem we have with software nowadays. There are 19 stacks in this repository. 19 pieces of software that require their own maintenance, JUST TO RUN YOUR APPLICATIONS! The amount of extra work required just to host the software that views your pictures, plays your videos, and allows chat with people is absolutely insane. I'm not talking about this particular rep…

I agree that the number of different technologies here is shocking, but you get a lot more value as a result than "just to run your applications". Most notably that includes CI/CD, scaling, and redundancy, all with IaC. These things used to require a lot more administration and development effort.

Plugging together all these different tools has become so much work though that in many organizations the platform team(s) who are mainly occupied with doing just that take up a lot of engineering resources.

In my opinion the next evolutionary step would be for all of this to be bundled and abstracted away. Funnily enough, we pretty much have that product already with autoscaled "serverless" cloud services, GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps pipelines etc.

The biggest problem is probably that things like AWS Lambda, SQS, and DDB lack versatility and user friendliness. If we get some improvements on that front, many organizations might opt for that instead of dealing with their own K8s deployments. Even better would be if we had something like a stripped-down version of OpenStack, just focussed on doing "serverless" right, and rebuilt from the ground up.

Re: My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

#120

Post by midasuni »

necovek wrote: post #71
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Compared to... running commands infrequently to administer servers? IaC is strictly and comically better.

Commands you use every day in the CLI? In your editor? I can trivially enter Emacs and modify Apache config when it breaks backwards compat between distribution upgrades, but when it's infrastructure as code...

I can’t think of a single time I’ve had an Apache config break with upgrades - other than having to recompile the webservice proxy module to change the case of the Upgrade header for a device that doesn’t work with the standards and is case sensitive

(Major upgrades every couple of years break the binary compatibility)

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