These last few months I’ve been writing a lot for Greater and today I can give away a tiny bit of the writing process. I’ve always been OK at writing documentation, but I certainly won’t go as far as saying that writing is a second nature. Writing a good piece of documentation and especially a blog post is hard. For a blog post, for me it takes a tremendous amount of time preparing, researching, testing, rewriting, proofreading, rewriting some more, etc. Coming up with only the idea for a new post can be, because of the gazillions of possibilities in the cloud native landscape, quite the challenge as well.

This is a fun one from a while ago. Let me warn you up front though: it goes against the principle to not login on your servers via SSH and use deployment tools like Ansible, but it has its use cases. So, what’s this all about?

We’ve covered quite a lot on our journey to automate the creation of one single VPS, hosting multiple websites or webapps. As you can see in the below diagram, we’re deploying to a Digital Ocean droplet, using Terraform and cloud-init. All code goes in git of course. Docker and Dockerfiles have been covered in part II of this series, Docker compose and a couple of web apps in part III.

Giving you a high overview of what we’ll be doing, the plan is to automate the creation of one single VPS, hosting multiple websites or webapps. We’re putting these sites or apps in containers and distribute the incoming requests with a cloud native reversed proxy. Since I’ll be introducing quite a lot of new technologies in this Greater blog series, I’m dividing this into four posts.