Up until a few weeks ago, I had been running this Wordpress multisite instance within the free tier of Google Cloud Platform, all while also serving play.kilumanga.com, using a virtual host configuration.

Needless to say, it was getting a little bulky for one instance. I mean, even though the machine type of the Compute Engine was a “mere” f1-micro, it had been running smoothly, successfully serving pages and SSH sessions all across the globe. However, with more and more features added almost daily, triggering frequent restarts of the Apache service, it only made sense to decouple the two main applications. And that’s not mentioning any trouble arising with continuous integration/deployment with eventual backend services or any experimental features I have been planning to implement. A phrase about eggs and a basket also comes to mind.

So after some serious digging around with providers and experimenting with technologies, I came up with a new architecture. One of the main features - that I hope to maintain at least for as long as this stays at the level of a hobby project - is that from the hosting, to the encryption, to the storage, to the middleware, to the integration tools, it is completely free. This, of course includes development tools, like terminal software, IDEs, text editors, public repositories on GitHub, and private repositories on GitLab.

There really is so much interesting technology to talk about here that I’m sure I’ll get back to them in more detail in future posts.