Introduction

As a passionate individual eager to delve into the world of DevOps, I found myself facing a common question: “What is a good beginner project to gain practical experience?” After exploring various resources and communities, I stumbled upon an insightful blog post titled “The Best DevOps Project for a Beginner” by Logan Marchione. Inspired by his guidance, I embarked on an exciting journey to build my own static website, and I would like to share my personal experience and lessons learned along the way.

Often it is difficult to get hands-on experience in DevOps. Doing a beginner challenge could solidfy otherwise only theoretical concepts.

Static site

He recommended building a static site. That’s the answer.

Why

A static site is a great beginner project because:

• It gave me a great chance to finally purchase mapuekyle.com
• I touched on how websites works (e.g., domain names, DNS, web hosting, certificates)
• Experienced more infrastructure-as-code (IaC) with Terraform
• I learned configuration management with Ansible
• I got to check how a static site generator works.
• Touches on how Git works
• Messed with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) with GitHub Actions

How

Below are the steps I took based on the outline of the steps for the challenge.

1. Purchase a domain
   • I took the liberty to browse through different sites/marketplace:
   • Hover, Cloudflare, Namecheap, AWS, etc…
   • Given that this is a personal website, I opted for a ‘.com’ on Namecheap
2. Create a two Github repositories
   • One for IaC code (Terraform and Ansible) repo-iac
   • One for static site’s code repo-static-site
3. Provision a virtual private server (VPS) in the cloud using Terraform
   • So I looked up the recommended options for VPS that has Terraform support: (DigitalOcean, AWS, Linode, OVH, Oracle Cloud, Scaleway, etc…)
   • For this project I used DigitalOcean (I like it because of the straightforward pricing)
   • This code was checked out on its respective repo
   • Notes: Don’t hard-code your API keys anywhere in your Terraform code, more like NEVER hard-code them.
   • Notes: There is an option for me to store them on my DigitalOcean account but they can also be stored remotely (HashiCorp offers free state storage in Terraform Cloud)
   • Improvements for future: Use Atlantis with your GitHub account to run Terraform via pull requests to GitHub
4. Setup DNS using Terraform
   • After I got the IP of my VPS, I linked mapuekyle.com to <my vps ip>
   • You can use a separate DNS provider (like Cloudflare, NS1, or DNSimple ), but your VPS provider might also offer DNS (e.g., DigitalOcean, AWS Route53, Linode, Scaleway, etc…)
   • This code was checked into Git on GitHub
5. Configure the VPS using Ansible
   • After the VPS is online, I installed updates, setup a user, install packages, mess with configuration files, etc…
   • I also installed a webserver Nginx.
   • This code was checked into Git on GitHub
   • Notes: Learned that I can get a TLS certificate for free from Let’s Encrypt and configure your webserver to redirect from port 80 to 443
   • Improvements for future: Instead of making one big playbook, use roles
6. Run Ansible through Docker
   • I thought it would be a good practice for me to run my Ansible playbook through Docker (but you can definitely run it as usual)
   • I created a dockerfile inside my Ansible directory and installed respective dependencies for me to run the playbook.
7. Create the static site locally on your PC
   • I choose from an extensive list of static site generator (here)
   • I initially used a different site that runs on react but opted for~
   • Hugo,(consider things like speed, available themes, the language the templates are written in, plugins, if you’re migrating from another data source, etc…)
   • I chose Hugo for its simplicity and speed.
   • This code was checked into Git on Github
8. Deploy the site to your VPS using Setup GitHub Actions
   • The goal is to automate deploying the static site’s rendered code from GitHub to VPS
   • The automation is set on each push but you can definitely add other triggers (e.g., on each commit to Git, on a schedule, on a tag, etc…)
   • Improvements for the future: Use GitHub Actions to lint your Terraform code with tflint and Ansible code with ansible-lint
   • Bonus: Setup a free GitHub Pages domain at mapuekyle.github.io and push a dev/test version of your site to there but you can also do it on Netlify.

Cost

In my setup, I’m spending $66/year on my site and the surrounding infrastructure.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building a static website as a beginner project proved to be an excellent choice. It laid the foundation for my DevOps aspirations and provided a solid platform for future growth. I encourage fellow beginners to embark on this journey, embrace the challenges, and experience the transformative power of hands-on learning in DevOps.

I am looking forward to doing The Cloud Resume Challenge and navigating my way through roadmap.sh).

-Kyle