About Cloud Cauldron

Cloud Cauldron is a small consultancy helping Enterprise organizations 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 Gitlab 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:

  • A dedicated VPC, and EC2 Spot instance spun up with Terraform (OpenTofu ) running a Debian 12 AMI but encrypted.

  • 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.

  • All important persistent data and configuration lives on a separate encrypted volume mounted at /volume

  • 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 Gitlab separately. nginx reverse proxies it.

  • 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:
    • My business site (just nginx) - but soon to be my business blog (nginx and hugo)
    • My family tree site (just nginx)

  • There are 3 crontab jobs executing commands inside the docker containers:

    • Every 15 minutes, exec into php and update my TTRSS site to get check RSS feeds.
    • Every 31 minutes, exec into php and run the Nextcloud cron processing.
    • Every 5 minutes, use Git to pull all configuration from Github, then exec into the Hugo container and generate the static blogs.

  • Issues I still need to fix:

    • The Terraform isn’t in Gitlab and its state is local on my laptop.
    • The Gitlab repo that controls all of it stores the web certificates so I can’t make it public.
    • The big volume only has 1 snapshot and it’s not automated yet.