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"Elf-Disclosure" for June 2023

It's been a month since ElfHosted was born! πŸ‘Ά

I've worked way more than I expected, and the work has been harder than I expected, but I've immensely enjoyed the challenge of building something fast and in public.

What follows here are our recent changes, the current stats - time/money spent, revenue (haha), and lots of data / graphs re the current state of the platform.

What is ElfHosted? 🧝

ElfHosted is "self-hosting as a service" (SHAAS? ) - Using our Kubernetes / GitOps designs, we've build infrastructure and automation to run popular self-hosted apps (think "Plex, Radarr, Mattermost..") and attach your own cloud storage ("bring-your-own-storage").

You get $10 free credit when you sign up, so you can play around without commitment!

We're building "in public", so follow the progress in the open-source repos, the blog or in Discord.

TL;DR? Here's a guide to getting started, and another to migrating from another provider.

This post may not format nicely via RSS

To make the amount of data presented below easier to parse, I've used mkdocs-material content tables to format / display data. This will probably not look good in a feed reader, so if what follows looks like a huge mess, view it in your browser instead!

What's new/next?

Here's what we achieved in June 2023 (not an exhaustive list, there's only so much space!):

  • Prod website based on (you guessed it!) mkdocs-material (look familiar?)
  • HA, fault-tolerant K3s Kubernetes cluster (3 servers, 3 agents, 3 ceph nodes)
  • Dedicated CI environment for pre-testing infrastructure changes
  • BYO storage / VPN fully self-service when purchasing via the store
  • All previously supported Seedplicity apps available 5
  • CLI tool (ElfBot) for self-service app restarts, backups, resets

Here's what's on the short-list for prioritization next:

  • Bring BYOVPN config to Deluge and ruTorrent
  • Add new apps to support Premiumize
  • Migrate to prod store, make bundles easier to manage
  • Regular daily maintenance period for app updates / maintenance
  • Load test with more users!

Stats

Here's our stats, updated for June 2023:

Focus June 2023
Cluster $428
Store $632 1
CI $208
Cloud $30
Development 146h / $21,900 2
Focus June 2023
Users 14
Ingress 24TB
Egress 1TB 4
Pods 478
Focus June 2023
Total invested thus far $23,200 6
Revenue $0

Resources

Most apps consume almost no CPU while idle - the larger consumers are streamers doing transcoding, and download clients doing download/unpack operations:

CPU stats for June 2023

This graph represents memory usage across the entire cluster. By far the largest consumers of RAM are the storage platforms (longhorn and ceph):

Memory stats for June 2023

I'm not sure these stats are accurate, they've likely overly high because pods on the host network (like metallb, ceph, etc) will end up counting all traffic on each host, rather than the pod itself. This is an outstanding issue to fix!

Memory stats for June 2023

These are the traffic stats for egress from Hetzner. They exclude any traffic to/from Hetzner Storageboxes:

Traffic stats for June 2023

Longhorn provides RWX volumes for /config, and for some infrastructure components like Prometheus, Chartmuseum, etc.

Longhorn stats for June 2023

Ceph provides optional storage ("ElfStorage"), typically used for long-term slow storage and seeding:

Ceph stats for June 2023

Join us!

Want to get involved?

Want to get involved? Join us in Discord and come and test-in-production!

Chef's notes πŸ““

  1. Much of this is yearly fees for Wordpress plugins ↩

  2. Yes, that's a lot! This is the opportunity cost, over a month, of focusing on ElfHosted rather than billable consulting work! ↩

  3. Total spend includes yearly payments for Wordpress plugins, etc ↩

  4. Low egress is good, because ingress is always free, but Hetzner charges for egress after 20TB! ↩

  5. Except Minio, which we're not bringing back! ↩

  6. All moneyz are in US dollarz! ↩

Tip your waiter (sponsor) πŸ‘

Did you receive excellent service? Want to compliment the chef? (..and support development of current and future recipes!) Sponsor me on Github / Ko-Fi / Patreon, or see the contribute page for more (free or paid) ways to say thank you! πŸ‘

Employ your chef (engage) 🀝

Is this too much of a geeky PITA? Do you just want results, stat? I do this for a living - I'm a full-time Kubernetes contractor, providing consulting and engineering expertise to businesses needing short-term, short-notice support in the cloud-native space, including AWS/Azure/GKE, Kubernetes, CI/CD and automation.

Learn more about working with me here.

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