So recently with the new hardware acquisitions for the Rack, and having more resources to do things; I’ve been looking at ways to host multiple sites across multiple servers.

The properly engineered and much heavier way to do things would be to run something like a Docker Swarm, or a Proxmox HA Cluster; something that uses the high availability model and keeps things running. However, honestly, I haven’t quite reached that stage of things, or rather, I think there’s too many unknowns (to me) with what I want to do.

What I want to achieve

I want to be able to setup my servers in such a way that I have these websites running; and should the hardware fail, they’ll continue to operate by being redeployed with minimal input from me. Reducing effort and cost to keep things running. The problem I’m trying to solve is two-fold:

1. I want to separate my personal projects away from the same server as my paying clients
2. I’d like to get High Availability working for these paying clients

The Existing Stack

The way I served my website content out to the greater world was pretty basic. It involved a bunch of docker containers, and some local host mounts – all through Docker Compose. It looked something like this:

Overall, it’s quick, it’s simple to execute and do backups with; but it’s restricted to a single physical server. If that server were to have catastrophic hardware failure, that’d be that. My sites and services would be offline until I personally went and redeployed them onto a new server.

The “New Stack” a first step…

So what’s the dealio?

Well, my current webserver stack uses an NGINX reverse proxy to parse traffic to the appropriate website containers; but what if these containers are on MULTIPLE servers? Taking my sister’s and my personal website projects as an example:

The above shows how the sites could be distributed across 2 different servers. The problem being, I can only route 80,443 (HTTP/HTTPS) traffic to one IP at a time. The solution?

NGINX Proxy Manager – this should be a drop-in solution on top, by installing it in a new third server, all traffic from the internet gets routed to it, and it’ll point them to the right server as needed.

Something like this:

I’m still left with some single points of failure (my Router, the NGINX Proxy Manager server) – but the workload is spread across multiple servers in terms of sites and services. Backing up files, configurations all seems relatively simple, although I’m left with a lot of snowflake situations – I can afford that. The technical debt isn’t so great as it’s a small number of servers, sites, services and configurations to manage.

So for the time being; this is the new stack I’ve rolled out to my network.

Coming soon though, the migration of everything from Docker Containers to High Availability VMs on Proxmox! Or at least, that’s the plan for now… Over Easter I’ll probably roll this out.