mirror of
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54 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
+++
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title = "Tiny CDN"
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#title = "Overengineering my low traffic website"
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#title = "Running a tiny CDN for $3/m"
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#title = "Deploying my Rust web application around the world"
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date = 2024-11-22T08:55:40+10:00
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# [extra]
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# updated = 2024-07-26T09:58:10+10:00
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+++
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- Linked List is a Rust application
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- I track how long it takes to generate a response. I.e. from request received to response generated
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- On my Vultr VM this took 1ms or less, however some pages like the home page would sometimes take multiple milliseconds, I felt I could do better.
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- The application loads the content into memory and renders on the fly for each request
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- I added caching so that the body is only generated once, then served for future requests
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- Response generation time now averages about a third of a millisecond 323µs
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- I was satisfied with that until I saw the charts in updown.io
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- Unsurprisingly with my server in Australia, the actual times people would experience when
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vesting could be a lot higher. [image]
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- I could have slapped Clouflare or Fastly in front of the site and called it a day but
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a. that's no fun
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b. I'd prefer to avoid giving them (especially Cloudflare) even more of the Internet's
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traffic, no matter how miniscule.
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- Based on basic stats from GoatCounter the bulk of my visitors were coming from the US
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or Europe, so I wanted to have the site running in those locations in addition to AU
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- Being a native exeutable the application is extremely lightweight so I did some
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research on bargain basement VPS's on LowEndBox and found a provider that offered
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KVM based VMs, custom ISO support, and had US and European data centres: RackNerd.
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- I created a server in New York, and another in France, they each cost about US$12 per **year** — probably still more than Cloudflare or Fastly but pretty cheap for a MV with 1Gb RAM.
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- I did some initial testing to verify that responses from these servers were in fact going to improve things (because they were so cheap I wanted to make sure the network and underlying hardware was not over provisioned)
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- I then installed Chimera Linux on each of the two new servers using my pyinfa install scripts
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- todo: chimera resource usage RAM and disk
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- I wrote more pyinfra code to install and configure other stuff that they needed like nginx
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- I defined a cports template for the linkedlist binary so that it could be installed as an apk package on the system, with dinit config to manage the service
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- SSL certs proved to be a challenge as the all needed a copy of the certs. I explored various options here, it's common problem with a bunch of hosted and self-hosted solutions. But all seems too complicated just for syncing two files between servers
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- I use lego to manage certs from Let's Encrypt
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- I wasn't super keen on the idea of one of the app servers needing to know about and push the certs to the others
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- In the end I revived a fanless Qotom Mini PC https://qotom.net/product/29.html, again using my Chimera install scripts to set it up followed by more
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pyinfra code to configure it
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- This machine is in my home is responsible for managing the certs with lego and pushing out updated files when they're renewed via a new hook script
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- I already had a third server in Australia hosting my Chimera Linux mirror that I roped into being an AU POP for Linked List
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- I coordinate thigs with a simple Makefile
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- make apk will build the linkedlist apk using cbuild. This works on Arch Linux as well as my Chimera WSL2 install on my Windows ARM laptop: cross-compiling is build into cbuild/cports
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- make deploy-apk pushes out the updated apk to the servers, updates them, and restarts it
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- make deploy, rsyncs the content to the servers. I use xargs to do this in parallel to them all
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- Now all the servers were running the application I needed to work out how to route traffic to them
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- I toyed with using Deno Deploy's edge network to act as a proxy (link to sample code) but I didn't like that this added the additional latency of an extra request.
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- I ended up using gcode managed DNS, which has a GeoDNS feature where you can resolve requests based on geo ip info
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- I'm happy to pay for this but I'm currently in their free tier.
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- This is the config I used there:
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- x goes to y, z goes to a, b is default as it's the most powerful
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- I used ping bear to check things as well as updown
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- This is the end result
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