susam.net VS docker-rollout

I have a similar setup for my personal and project websites. Some similarities and differences:

* I use Linode VMs ($5/month).

* I too use Debian GNU/Linux.

* The initial configuration of the VM is coded as a shell script: https://github.com/susam/dotfiles/blob/main/linode.sh

* Project-specific or service-specific configuration is coded as individual Makefiles. This takes care of creatng An example: https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile

* The software is written in Common Lisp. In case of a personal website or blog, a static website is generated by a Common Lisp program. In case of an online service or web application, the service is written as a Common Lisp program that uses Hunchentoot to process HTTP requests and return HTTP responses.

* I use Nginx too. Nginx serves the static files as well as functions as a reverse proxy when there are backend services involved. Indeed TLS termination is an important benefit it offers. Other benefits include rate limiting requests, configuring an allowlist for HTTP headers to protect the backend service, etc.

I began developing personal websites in 2001. It was a time when people like me would develop personal websites just because we could. It didn't matter whether we had something useful to say or if anyone visited the website. All that mattered was that it was fun! I still maintain my website in the same spirit.

I do share the technical posts from my websites on HN and Reddit hoping to get some feedback but that's not the primary motive. Also, there were no HN and Reddit in 2001. Back then I used to write for myself and I still do so now. My personal website is a way for me to keep an archive of some fun things I know so that my future self can look back at them when needed or desired. Only a few days ago, I added a jokes page[1] to my website just because I thought it would be nice to keep my favourite jokes somewhere easily accessible.

As years go by, I've found that the friction of editing and publishing new posts or pages to my website has only become less. First came, virtual private servers that swayed me away from shared web hosting solutions. Then came Git which made it incredibly efficient and convenient to keep a change history of my website and sync it to any system. I write my pages in plan HTML using Emacs. Then git add; git commit; make pub [2] and the updated website is published within seconds. A Common Lisp program reads all my HTML pages, adds a common theme and template to them and writes them out to a directory Nginx can read from. It is as low friction as it can get that suits my taste and preferences while maintaining complete flexibility on the website.

It has been 13 years since I wrote my first "Hello!" and while HTML and web development and publishing has evolved a lot since then, I am still having fun!

[1] https://susam.net/maze/jokes.html

[2] https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/main/Makefile#L144

form.service (the systemd unit file)

Source code [0] is available on GitHub; looks like they wrote their own simple site generator.

I've been thinking about something similar (maybe even simpler) for my blog too.

[0]: https://github.com/susam/susam.net

I created a CDK deploy that uses docker-rollout [1][2] to deploy highly available infrastructure to EC2 using only autoscaling groups. It is not super polished but it is a complete example, so it could be useful if you are considering hosting on EC2. Rolling out deploys involves updating one file on S3 and running one script.

Ironically after all that setup, I decided to give Linode with k8s a try [3] :-) (due to aws' high costs of egress and NAT gws / IPv4 tax on AWS, and the fact that some apps that I want to run are easier to deploy with helm).

More notes:

* I did try ECS and Fargate, which are nice, but also come with associated costs and a bunch of complexity. At that point, I rather spend time directly with k8s, which should make my localhost parity way higher, and hosting somewhere more affordable.

* I tried both Pulumi and Terraform. I have mixed feelings about them. I ended up using CDK because it _felt_ like the nicer development experience (except when CloudFormation fails and it kind of hides the reason why, sigh ... fishing for logs on CloudWatch is such a drag!).

* I tried to add some NACL rules since I ended up running the thing on a public VPC. I couldn't make it work but at that time I had already decided to host elsewhere so I left it like that :-). I did succeed on adding support for AWS WAF. Sadly, the cdk currently doesn't have high level support for WAF so it was not as nice to setup.

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1: https://github.com/Wowu/docker-rollout

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34690947

3: https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-m...

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This way, Caddy will buffer the request and give 30 seconds for your new service to get online when you're deploying a new version.

Ideally, during deployment of a new version the new version should go live and healthy before caddy starts using it (and kills the old container). I've looked at https://github.com/Wowu/docker-rollout and https://github.com/lucaslorentz/caddy-docker-proxy but haven't had time to prioritize it yet.