Evan Cloud & Evan Home Architecture Overview

What currently makes up Evan Cloud and Evan Home today

I have written the odd post about Evan Cloud and Evan Home (better names coming soonTM) but today I wanted to give a more broad overview of what makes these two services up, in terms of actual hardware. Or in the case of cloud, virtualised hardware. I’ll also briefly touch on some plans that I have in the works for where this footprint will go over time. Lets touch on the home side of things first since we talk about cloud a lot here as well.

Evan Home

One of the original goals I had for this project was to take back control of my personal data. Google Drive, Dropbox, One Drive, I’ve used all these services at times. They all work really well, you know your data is relatively safe and you basically have it with you wherever you go. The problem I’ve had, is that for the first one in that list - Google Drive, I’ve basically de-Googled my life. The amount of personal data have on me would be immense. Sure they secure your data with encryption and physically protect the facilities it’s in, but there’s nothing really stopping them from seeing that data. It’s well known that Gmail emails were scanned to determine what adverts would be best to show you. I switched to ProtonMail and DuckDuckGo a few years ago, but when it came to data, the solution was only spun up a few months ago.

Enter - Synology! Synology if you’re not familiar with them, are a company who build NAS units, among other things. I believe they even sell their own drives now, but for the most part you have to buy your own. I was going to build my own system initially, but I felt I was not confident in my data management skills yet, so I wanted something that would hold my hand a bit more. The model I chose was the DS920+, the at the time, latest generation unit of their four bay model. There is no mention of four in that model number, that’s because this unit supports their five bay expansion unit, so a total of nine drives is possible. I absolutely LOVE this thing. I installed 6TB Seagate IronWolf drives, for a total of 24TB of raw capacity, after OS install and a RAID 10 volume, I was left with about 11.5TB of usable space. There is also two M.2 slots for a solid state cache down the line, which is something I’m considering. Overall, I love the hardware, love the software and what started as just a “hold my hand” exercise, may turn into more Synology units in the future. I might do a review of this some time, just to completely rave about it in a non objective manner. Since all hardware needs a name, this unit is known as Jupiter, after the gas giant in our solar system.

To supplement my learning a little bit more of storage technologies, I resurrected my old desktop and called it Europa. It has a somewhat old and overheating Intel CPU with 16GB of DDR3 memory and a collection of old Sandisk, non-NAND based SSDs. It does have a brand new, 650W power supply. The aim was to take this heap of gear and use it to experiment with technologies like ZFS and maybe even virtualisation. But, when it came to it, things were just not working out for me. EVERYTHING gets hot these days, CPU and SSDs. So unfortunately, I think this one will be retired. Not before saving the PSU however, a “Europa V2” may be coming down the line.

Finally for now, everything including end user devices are all on top of a UniFi network from Ubiquiti. I’m currently running a UniFi Dream Machine Pro, UniFi Switch 24 Pro and a UniFi FlexHD for wireless. I’m still quite a while away from learning all the tricks and turning on all the features. But, I was making an investment in gear that I’m fully expecting to be around with me for a few years. There are plans for some additions as well, most likely a second access point and possibly introducing UniFi Protect as well. But for now, all this gear is running and all battery backed up by a APC Back UPS Pro 900.

Evan Cloud

In posts not too long ago, I talked about changing from AWS to DigitalOcean for my public cloud needs. Would you be surprised if I told you I changed providers again? A while ago a group known as OVHcloud experienced a fire in one of their data centers, which brought me to their attention. Fires aside, their public cloud offerings in terms of pricing were very competitive. For example, they don’t meter on bandwidth in most of their regions. If you commit month to month, they will also give you 50% off your costs, which is incredible savings for such a short period of commitment. With any of the other major providers, you’re probably looking at a three year commitment to reach that level of savings. So, I jumped ship once again!

On OVHcloud, I’m running my Kubernetes cluster, along with some other instances that I may use from time to time, such as remote development work or some containers I’ve not quite placed on Kubernetes yet. They also have an interesting Logs platform, however I believe I will be using the SaaS version of Elastic Stack from Elastic themselves until I self host my own cluster, it’s just for convenience at this stage. There is also a Harbor registry for Docker images that again I’m just using in a SaaS form, but may transition to self hosting in the future.

It’s worth mentioning that I think their public cloud offerings are still a bit new, I think there could be more done on the metrics front so that I could see the standard metrics like CPU, disk, network, at a glance from the console. But I will leave it pass since the prices are just too damn good.

Conclusions and Plans

So that’s where I’m at, at the moment. Bit of a high level overview. But the immediate plans include things such as building out Europa V2 for local experiments on storage and VMs. I’m also hoping to transition to bare metal machines on OVHcloud to give myself a further degree of control. Electricity in Ireland is just expensive and I don’t want to increase the physical footprint of all my gear if I could end up moving house towards somewhere possibly smaller. Rest assured, this blog will be updated with all my plans and explosions that happen throughout this journey :)