I should regain the control of my digital life, with Docker.

Photo by Jason Dent / Unsplash

Some days ago after long working hours for almost a month streak, went back to work and start randomly browsing on network.

And an idea just pop-up inside my head: "Why I have to use all these service and let the company controls my data?"

So I decided to draw a blueprint, to regain all my digital life back to my hand.
But do not get me wrong, I still use Instaram to share the things that I love, but not for most of the anything else.

So this is the journey begins, first I choose AWS as my first try, because my work is already using Azure exclusively and it's well-known to me, so I decide why not give AWS a try?

But things not went very well, big time.

First of all is the pricing system, I spend nearly a week trying to figure out how much services is AWS offering and what those pricing plan is, but I decided if I'm ever going to do this, I'm going to do it NOT old fasioned way.

My eyes got locked on on ECS, which makes Docker deployment easy and I don't have to worrried about any system management. because I already burned out at work, don't want to struggled that even on my own time.

but just after some hours I figured that isn't that easy to handle ECS with Docker Hub only deployment, it's have some twist in it, because you still have to open an EC2 backend to run on it, even lightsail is REALLY expensive for a single docker service that I want to host. compares to DigitalOcean or Vultr, it's basically a huge disadvantage.

so I move my hosting platform on DigitalOcean.

even though, I still need something to manage all kinds the service I want to host by myself, inside my head I have couple of services I want to host:

  • Matrix
    • for IRC Bridge so I can ditch IRCCloud charges 5 bucks every months.
    • Social Media Bridge, Instagram / Signal / Twitter DM and such
  • A federated Social Media
    • now days I rarely uses Twitter, already move to Mastodon, just cross-posting, why not just selfhost one and do it from there?
  • Git
    • HATE Microsoft, AAAAAAND gitlab. so I wish I can host Gitea.
  • Note Taking
    • already a big fan of Notion / GoodsNote 5, but I need something that can be sync / mobile friendly and self host all my data.
  • Wiki
    • can't count the times that googled some question and eventually finds the answer in search results that is on my OWN BLOG, so I need one sort of knowledge palace for it.
  • RSS reader
    • ever since GoogleReader died, moved to Freedly, but Freedly Pro is quite expensive too.
  • Finacial Things,
    • well, I think this one is essential, because when doing tax most of the time I ended up to "Where all my money goes?"
  • A Blog. Which you are reading it right now.
    • I ended up going back to Ghost, just because it's the most painless thing to work with docker, it just works.

Well, the list is finished, so let's get right to it.