Let’s Get Started - App Infrastructure

Written By Luis Barnes

Welcome to Tech Thoughts!

As you know the most important part of Tek Forward’s mission is to teach. Well, there is also learning. And that’s what I am going to do, taking you along for the ride, if you let me!

I am going to learn how to install and run a web server, an application server, a database server, and an in-memory database. These are the minimum number of servers necessary to run an application, even a website. Yes, I know you can do it with less, but in the real world, large applications run using all of these, and then some. In the interest and learning and teaching, it made sense to me to start with these, and if need be, add more later on.

Let’s start with what specific software and hardware I am going to use.

Hardware. I decided to use real PC’s here at the office, rather than working on the cloud. My reasons are simple:

  • I lack the know-how to use Google Cloud or AWS to create the instances necessary.

  • Even if I did, I know this will be a long process, and even though both GC and AWS provide free tiers, these tiers are not free forever. I do not want to incur unnecessary cost, even if its later on.

  • I am using “mini-pc”, cheap, quite powerful PC’s, one for each server, allowing me to reboot at will, wipe them clean and start again at will, and everything that comes with having your own server in hand.

  • I have four of them, in various configurations. Which will get used for what will be explained later. They are, RAM and SSD size only:

    • 12 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD

    • 8 GB RAM, 256 SSD

    • 16 GB RAM, 512 SSD

    • 8 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD

Software. I spent some time reading and researching, not necessarily the best, but also the most widely used applications for each, taking into consideration the development language of the application (Python, HTML, Javascript). With these in mind, here are the softwares I chose:

I welcome all comments, opinions, advice as I go along. Keep in mind that I am literally learning as I go, and that’s part of the fun. I hope you tag along!

Yours,

Luis

Luis Barnes
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