About Cloud Cauldron
Cloud Cauldron is a small consultancy helping Enterprise organisations adopt DevOps and Cloud Computing.
We specialise in:
- Cloud Infrastructure as code in AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Cloud migration and adoption.
- Enterprise DevSecOps and continuous integration and delivery.
- Docker and container platforms.
- Microservices and architectural evolution.
- Observability (logging, metrics, events, tooling, etc).
- AWS Lambda and serverless.
- Site reliability engineering and Operational support.
- Database Administration.
- And more!"
About This Web Site
I’ve recently finished rebuilding both my AWS servers into this common containerised platform running in a single Spot instance. The final piece was getting my Git server instance in place. I still haven’t imported the old server’s export. For anyone interested, I’ll do a more in depth explanation when I build my Cloudcauldron blog - but it basically looks like this:
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A dedicated VPC, and EC2 Spot instance spun up with Terraform (OpenTofu) running a Debian Sid AMI but encrypted.
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Root volume is small and remains mostly untouched. Only enough changes to the root volume to enable it to reboot without needing any configuration changes.
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All important persistent data and configuration lives on a separate encrypted volume mounted at /volume. This gets backed up via a snapshot from AWS Data Lifecycle Manager.
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I’ve open sourced all the Terraform/OpenTofu to create it all here.
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Everything important is running as a Docker container via Docker Compose. There are 5 major Docker containers that need to remain up:
- certbot: Mostly sleeping for 12 hours at a time but then checking for certs that need to be renewed
- nginx: Powers all the static and tool sites.
- php: Has the same mounts as nginx and runs any PHP needed
- mariadb: Powers any needed mysql/mariadb databases.
- gitlab: powers Gitea separately. nginx reverse proxies it.
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All Powering These Sites:
- A Wordpress site powering a personal archive. (nginx and php)
- bocan.dev - A 1 page CV site. (just nginx)
- cfunder.me - A personal URL shortener. (nginx and php)
- My personal blog (nginx and hugo), and tooling hidden underneath:
- A personal photo gallery powered by Piwigo.
- A webapp that gives quotes and advice.
- My self hosted Nextcloud engine.
- A time dashboard I built to amuse myself.
- My business site (just nginx) - but soon to be my business blog (nginx and hugo)
- My family tree site (just nginx)
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There are 3 crontab jobs executing commands inside the docker containers:
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Issues I still need to fix:
- The Terraform state is local on my laptop.
- The Github repo that controls all of the content stores the web certificates so I can’t make it public.