Today I broke away from cloud providers. For a very long time(11 years I ran my apps in AWS and google cloud) I have small instances that time which cost me about 40-50USD per month. This amount is small for most people but for me its additional burden so I looked for a way to save that 50 bucks. It turns out that there is a cheaper alternative for me. Below are the things I have acquired to break out from cloud providers.
- Internet connectivity with public static IP. Globe/PLDT and Converge already offer this cheaply with just a DTI document required.
- Network infrastructure, Firewall, network switches etc
- Power backup, I built a 1kw power backup(UPS) all parts are from shopee. This backup can cover more than 24 hours of main power outage(fully tested).
- Physical server
Thats it, if you have all of it, you can break away from cloud providers. For securing my network I use OPNsense for my bastion/edge network and OpenBSD PF for internal security and bandwidth management.
For my physical servers, I only have 2, one for handling all ingress connections to my applications, the other one is for hosting my applications.
Physical server specs:
Ingress server(Reverse Proxy) Orange Pi PC (4 cores @ 1Ghz with 1GB meory and 16GB MicroSD)
Application server(Go based apps) Orange Pi PC (4 cores @ 1Ghz with 1GB meory and 32GB MicroSD)
They may look low specs but it is morethan enough for my needs. I choose Orange Pi because they dirt cheap but robust and most of all they are low power and suited for 24/7 operation.