Bare Metal

In this series, I'm building on my own cloud computing platform, kind of My goal today is to answer a few questions. N And n To get started, let's take a quick look at the arc At the bottom, we have our networking backbone. T I'm using an eight port switch, w And by the way, if you need a refresher about how t Moving up the diagram, we have the physical servers, and you can see I'm using five servers in my cloud. The first server will be running a firewall and routing platform called OpenSense. And I'll be using it for things Now, OpenSense can run on pretty low end hardware. For my cluster, I'm using an inexpensive Intel Nook with four cores and eight gigabytes of RAM. You really don't have to spend a lot of money here. The next server is what I call a platform server. It'll be used for shared services for my applications, things Since the platform server is going to be loaded up with a lot of services, I'll be using a server with a In t And for the hard drive, I'll be using a one terabyte NVMe drive. The last three servers will host my applications or workloads. And they'll run a virtualization platform called Proxmox. What Proxmox gives us is the ability to create and manage virtual mac And this will give us a lot of flexibility with our applications and mimic the virtual machines you can provision using a cloud Another nice feature built into Proxmox is a subsystem called Ceph. And Ceph will look T But to make Ceph work, I'll have to install an extra hard drive on each server. So one drive for the operating system and one drive dedicated to Ceph. I'll also be adding some extra RAM into each of the Proxmox servers. Next, let's talk about the pricing. For the networking, we're looking at about $30 for the Ethernet switch. And maybe $20 to $30 for the cables. For the physical servers, I'm using one Intel Nook, w The remaining four servers will be from B-link and cost about $300 each. Again, for the three Proxmox servers, I'm adding an extra hard drive and some extra memory. So the total for everyt Keep in mind t Now $2,000 is a pretty big commitment. So what can you do if you're on a tight budget? There are a few options. You could manually set up DNS and IP addressing and get rid of the open sense server. Keep in mind you always have the option to add it again later. The applications in the platform server can also be run in your Proxmox cluster. The reason I decided to go with a separate platform server is I wanted the ability to experiment with my Proxmox cluster. I wanted to be able to tear it down and rebuild it and not worry about losing my shared services. But if you're on a budget or you just want to simplify t And finally, you can scale your Proxmox cluster down to just one server and start from there. You'll lose some functionality In a future video, I'll show you how you can easily add a new Proxmox node to your cluster. Scaling back our physical servers to just one reduces our cost to roughly $500 US dollars. Now you might be able to use some existing hardware and reduce your cost even more. And that covers the hardware components of the cloud. In my next video, I'm going to dive into a complicated topic called Public Key Infrastructure, or PKI. PKI is used to create TLS certificates that I'll use to encrypt all the traffic in the cloud. And I'll also introduce a domain name that I'll be using for t lan. And that wraps up our video for today. Thanks for stopping by, and I'll