Baby’s first private cloud

August 8, 2021 — August 20, 2021

computers are awful together
confidentiality
cryptography
wonk

Tiny miniature cloud apps run from your home, for hobbyist projects. Ideally to be worth being called a private cloud this should be a system which keeps containerized apps alive and available. Or whole VMs, I guess. A cloud, that is to say, on my home network.

Figure 1

1 Orchestration

I.e. getting all those containers running and talking to each other.

1.1 Docker swarm

A simple orchestration tool built in to docker. See the Swarm mode overview and the Docker swarm example.

1.2 hashicorp

An orchestration tool which my friend Justin Maynard assures me is easier than kubernetes.

1.3 kubernetes

Too complicated for my tiny brain. Maybe it would be easier with Portainer as a GUI?

2 Accessing

How do you set up these services to be accessible outside your house? Probably a VPN if this is to be a real serious setup. For a small number of devices, mesh VPN Tailscale might do the trick.

3 Monitoring

Australia’s internet is shit and my ISP is mediocre and my router is mediocre, so any private cloud I have I should be monitoring for downtime via dead-man’s switch. Here are some services which handle that: