Looking for Some Architectural Direction - Where to Start?

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Hi Folks,

I’m looking for a place to start, and hoping you might be able to point me in the right direction.

I’m in the process of assembling “civic.net” - as a next generation Internet of neighborhood networks. (Think old style FreeNets and the attempt at an American Public Telecomputing Network) built with modern technology. Or think of the IETF.org ecosystem for supporting the myriad of working groups operating under the IETF umbrella. Starting with simply hosting a bunch of email lists, a file library, a wiki, some RSS feeds, and some web sites.

I’ve built a lot of old style enterprise systems, and currently run a small xen-based cluster for our internal email & list services - but now - the servers are aging, and I’m thinking that I’d like to move it all into the cloud - and do it in a completely decentralized, vendor independent way (user computing at the edge, plus at least 2 vendors for image & storage hosting.

I’ve been following IPFS & related technologies (and cluster technologies before that) - but there’s way too much, and I haven’t found a good starting point for thinking about enterprise style infrastructure. Maybe starting with our email handling & list server.

I’m naively thinking: Docker images running over Bacalhau, backed by IPFS storage, with WASM/IPVM within webapps - maybe with Cloudflare for content distribution. These seem to be the technologies with some legs. But … where to start?

Which brings me to three questions I’d like to pose to the community, prefaced by:

  1. Where & how to address the community? There are various communities around DWEB, IPFS, Bacalhau, etc., etc. - but it’s not clear where they come together. Any Suggestions? And, the questions themselves:

  2. Can somebody point me at some case studies of email infrastructure built on a hybrid, multi-vendor cloud?

  3. Any opinions on the state of Bacalhau & IPFS for such an endeavor?

  4. Any thoughts on multivendor compute & storage - it seems like with both containers & storage, one quickly ends up connected to one vendor or another.

Thanks very much for any advice & pointers you might be able to offer.

Best Regards,

Miles Fidelman

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You’d be surprised how far you can go with self hosted modern hardware. But if you do decide to go to the cloud, I’d stick to VMs/bare metal servers over vendor specific services with custom APIs. The one exception to this is S3, which has many alternatives.

As for IPFS, if your websites are static, we have a lot of tooling to make hosting easier.Deploy static apps to IPFS with GitHub Actions | IPFS Docs
Custom domains and DNSLink | IPFS Docs

For storage, if you stick to S3 based tooling you should be pretty safe from vendor lock-in.

There’s
https://filebase.com/ which gives you IPFS hosting using S3 APIS
Ceph.io — Home self hosted with S3 compatible API
Low Cost, High Performance S3 Compatible Object Storage