Design and Planning

My systems design philosophies

  • Each piece of software should have a single set of capabilities
  • There should be minimal overlap in operational responsibilities between different parts of the stack
  • Each part of the stack should fit the following conditions:
    • Free
    • Open Source, ideally with an active community
    • Should be reliable when run using commonly available knowledge and best practices.
    • Software should be available from trusted repositories or as a OCI image. Building from source is acceptable if no alternatives exist.
    • Should have a low resource usage at idle
  • Standardization is key
  • integrations and tooling should be researched and compared before implementation(figure out what parts work well with each other before becoming dependent on something)

Standardization and Integration

Standardization is the key for allowing clean, maintainable integrations between systems and software. In my case, I have standardized on the following base software:

Proxmox Virtual Environment

  • Free and open source
  • Full support for consumer hardware
  • Reliable with a very active community(especially since the VMware Fiasco)
  • Supports linux and windows virtual machines
  • Support for cloud-init and has good automation options

Fedora Linux

  • Free and open source
  • Very active community, with strong corporate backing
  • Up-to-date software repositories, with secure defaults
  • Is very similar to RHEL/Almalinux/RockyLinux so there is lots of documentation on how to do anything
  • Since the Fedora/RHEL family is so common in enterprise, it integrates very well with all kinds of enterprise management and monitoring tools
  • Supports cloud-init and has first-party ansible modules

RouterOS

  • Ok not technically open source but since it’s a networking appliance I don’t really care. Also Mikrotik seems to be a pretty decent company.
  • Its affordable, at least my RB5009 was
  • While its not as beginner-friendly, it does exactly what you tell it to, with minimal hidden behaviors.
  • It has full support for basically every networking feature you could possibly want outside a commercial datacenter

Docker

  • This is how I run most of my applications.
  • It’s easy.
  • Almost every selfhosted app provides a docker-compose.yml in their docs.
  • It abstracts all the difficult parts of containerization away.
  • Anyone who dislikes the fact it’s not rootless. I’ll switch to podman - or back to k8s - at some point.