This is the third post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects where I look at setting up DigitalOcean Kubernetes without a load balancer. Why You Need a Load Balancer DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a convenient managed service for distributing traffic between backend servers, and it integrates natively with their Kubernetes service. They offer a quick way to expose services to the public internet without having to use NodePort....

This is the second post in a series on Modernizing my Personal Web Projects. In this post, I attempt to create a budget Kubernetes hosting setup on DigitalOcean. The goal is to provide everything I need to host my blogs and side-projects for under $50 USD. Let’s go! First Things First: Creating the Kubernetes Cluster The core part of this setup will be a managed Kubernetes cluster. I decided to use Kubernetes for its scalability and ease of deployment....

Background My personal web projects gone through various stages of web hosting. Starting with a fully hosted CompuServe page to running it on my dad’s ADSL connection. Since then I’ve been moving it back and forth between a little home server underneath my TV to a virtual machine on DigitalOcean. That’s been working well for a while, but recently I’ve been eager to try out a more modern web hosting platform for my personal projects....

Traditionally I’m a pretty late adopter of new trends, and Go has been out for something like 6 years now, so I figured it would be a good time to try it. I’ve been learning it for about 2 months; I’ve done dozens of Codility exercises, written a WebSocket server and a statusbar daemon, so I think I’ve given it a good go. My experience has been generally positive and I’ll definitely use it in future....

I’ve been wanting to try Docker ever since I saw a talk about it at Red Dot Ruby Conf. The idea of being able to build a container in development and ship it to staging, then production without any changes is extremely enticing, although I admit to being a little sceptical. Now I’ve implemented a Docker deployment process for the first time with one of my projects. Is Docker the holy grail of cloud deployment, or is it all just hype?...