A playbook for hosting simple services

Working at BigTech™ can sometimes skew your view of the world (a surprise to very few of you). One example is seeing how Kubernetes can cope with the massive deployment scale of hundreds/thousands of servers and thinking to yourself that this is effectively required knowledge (and if not now it soon will be) which leads to adopting these technologies for projects that will never see millions of daily active users. I fully leant into k8s for my home lab. At one point I had 6 netboot raspberry pis running a kubernetes cluster with etcd/ceph, using FluxCD and GitOps to manage... what amounts to a couple of self hosted apps. It was a nightmare to maintain. One one hand, I could plug a new raspberry pi into the network, add the mac address to the list of provisioned services and within 10 minutes it would be assimilated into the cluster. On the other hand just idling cause 30% CPU load and the SSDs had an estimated lifetime of about 4 years due to the excessive writes that etcd & ceph would make. All of this complexity was not worth it for a website that had 2-3 users (again this will come as a surprise to very few of you). This was obviously a ridiculous thing to do, but going through this process made me take stock of what I was looking for in a homelab and also how I build and ship everything. Kubernetes was costing me time and money for such little payoff, but the more I thought about it, so was other tech, like Docker. It was time to simplify.

So, the last few projects I've built have been handled differently. I've simply been copying the built artefacts onto a cheap server, no containers, no gitops, no high availability, just ssh and scp. This is a simplification over Docker for several reasons:

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