VSHN.timer #174: The Do-It-Yourself Strategy

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about developers self-hosting their applications, far away from the comfort of third-party providers.

1. We’re all happy consumers of SaaS applications… until their subscription price increase drastically, their privacy policy changes for the worst, or else. That’s when self-hosting sounds appealing. But what’s the real cost? Tedium explores the case for alternative analytics, email, and calendar tools.

https://tedium.co/2023/03/04/self-hosted-saas-app-alternatives/

2. One of the perks of having a successful product is the fame and the riches. Another is… well, the challenge of making a reliable and efficient service for millions of users. Take Discord for example: this is how they store trillions of messages in ScyllaDB.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-stores-trillions-of-messages

3. Whatever new single-page application you build and self-host these days, you might want to run it on an energy-efficient ARM system, and thankfully Bitnami has just added ARM support to their trusty containers.

https://blog.bitnami.com/2023/02/bitnami-arm-containers-available-at.html

4. The whole issue about self-hosting or not has to do with trust, just like with TLS and certificates. As the Joker rightfully asked, who do you trust? On the Jetstack blog, Ashley Davis explains how trust-manager orchestrates X.509 certificates on your clusters.

https://www.jetstack.io/blog/trust-manager/

5. Here’s an excellent idea: how about making self-documenting Makefiles? A simple trick that we use at VSHN every day to help us self-host our own systems.

https://marmelab.com/blog/2016/02/29/auto-documented-makefile.html

Do you self-host your own cloud applications? Have you documented your Makefiles yet? Who do you trust? Would you like to share any other tips and tricks with our readers? Get in touch with us, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

PS: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about programming: #18, #30, #33, #47, #50, #60, #77, #88, #101, #103, #122, #137, and #160.

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