More and more things move to a cloud.
Times when people used traditional servers have passed.
Who did not heard such sentences in previous years? So time for me to move to the cloud as well.
Powered by Arm cloud.
Why?
Call me old fashioned but I like to self host my services. At least some of them (web, private git repos, mail).
But a few months ago I got an e-mail from OVH:
As part of our project to make our datacentres hyper-resilient, we are starting the transformation of the RBX1 datacentre. Our aim is to modernise our infrastructure, in particular, the building where we house servers hosting all our cloud services. Despite our utmost efforts, this modernisation cannot be carried out without affecting your services.
We are writing to inform you that, as a result, the following Bare Metal servers will be closing down on 31 December 2024
I checked their prices for newer machines and decided that it is a bit too much. So it was time to move somewhere else.
Where?
I looked at options and then realised that someone mentioned ‘Free tier’ on Oracle cloud:
- 4 Arm Neoverse-N1 cores (Ampere Altra family)
- 24 GB of memory
- 200 GB of disk space
For free. I dusted my old account, checked is it “Pay As Yo Go” one and started playing with it.
Web first
First try was “let use a quarter”: one cpu core, 6 GB of memory and 50 GB of storage. Turned out that is quite enough to run several websites with small traffic. After some tweaks here and there machine got some testing and works.
This blog is hosted on Oracle cloud for a few weeks now and so far no one complained.
Mail second
My previous servers were handling my mail in standard way. Postfix as SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP. With added stuff on top like Amavis, ClamAV, SpamAssasin, OpenDKIM etc. etc. And Roundcube for webmail if someone needs.
But my system administrator never were top of the shelf ones. It worked, I tweaked it from time to time etc. So this time decided to go with some “all-in-one” solution.
Went with mailcow - a bunch of mail services running as containers, handling things and providing me with some WebUI for configuration.
Added accounts, aliases, setup IMAP sync jobs so all users had their mail present from previous server. Handled DNS changes and server went online.
Other services
In meantime I checked for services I run:
- Forgejo for git repositories (like this blog)
- Factorio server for multiplayer
- Discord bot
- other shit
My installation of Forgejo remembers Gitea times. So I took some time, cleaned configuration to get rid of gitea names from it. Now it is running with all old repositories.
Factorio multiplayer went to trash. There is no Linux/arm64 binary available.
Discord bot was Python. Migrated fine.
Other shit? Went through it, killed some, migrated some to other places.
Will it be enough?
How well will it serve my needs? Time will show. My first server had 4 GB ram and dual core Atom cpu (2 cores, 4 threads). And rotating rust as storage. The last one was i5-750 (4 cores) with 16 GB of memory and rotating rust.
So current duo of 2 cores with 8 GB each should work for some time.