Your Own Cloud
Over the last couple of months there is a lot of activity in Europe when it comes to moving out of the American cloud. This move is called Digital Autonomy, and there are a lot of articles on it, but I like the ones written by Bert Hubert.
When I am working on my own projects, or this website for that matter, I am using Github (which is owned by Microsoft). For some projects I use Gitlab, which was started in The Netherlands, but has now become an American company. Much of my development infrastructure is tied to American companies, simply because they offer the best tools for the job.
But then the discussion on digital autonomy comes in and I am thinking, “If I can not make the switch, how could anybody?”, so this weekend I started working on setting up my own environment for (sidenote: As a note of interest, to get a DevBox (with backups), costs about 9 euros on Hetzner) the tools I need for my software projects. I call this thing my DevBox.
After some tinkering I decided on Forgejo for my source control and project management, it is a reasonably complete replacement for Github and Gitlab. To make it work best it needs to be properly insulated and given certificates and things like that. To do that I installed Traefik, it is a reverse proxy that deals with pretty much all the nitty gritty of serving applications.
Of course it is a bad idea to install everything on a box just like that, so I create an Ansible playbook that pulls in the various docker containers, creates networks, connects the proxy to the backend docker containers and manages configuration files.
To further test out this setup I deployed on of my in-progress projects to the box, a workshop application I am building for my workshop at J-Fall, the biggest single day Java conference in Europe.
Once everything turns out to be working nicely for a little while I will also migrate over my blog and then start shutting down my Github and Gitlab accounts. For me that is an enormous moment, I have had these accounts for many years, my Github dates back to 2008.
Lets see if the box is big enough when I migrate everything in.