Cloud

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. However, managed load balancers are excessive for personal websites with low traffic, since they won’t fully utilise the performance or high-availability benefits. It also costs more, which is no good for my original goal of creating a budget Kubernetes setup! ...

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. By packaging my WordPress blogs and everything I want to run as containers, I can deploy them on Kubernetes in the same consistent way and let the cluster decide how to run them. If I want to run the same containers locally, or in a testing environment, it’ll be easily portable without having to manually install them on different servers. And more importantly, Kubernetes will ensure my apps are always running, even if the underlying server nodes have problems. That’s a load off my mind that I’ll never have to worry about. ...

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. ...