Books18 chapters4 h 36 min read
Hosting & Cloud
Web hosts, clouds, PaaS and frontend clouds, registrars, certificate authorities, edge networks and communications platforms look like different industries, and underneath they rent the same thing: capacity someone else owns, measured and billed by the month or the unit. Each one runs on a layer below it, a hyperscaler under a PaaS, a registry under a registrar, carriers under a texting platform, and passes that layer's fees, outages and rules through to its customers. This book tells the stack bottom to top and through its history, each layer with the problem it solved and what it cost, benchmarked across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, DigitalOcean, Akamai, Hetzner, OVHcloud, Vercel, Netlify, Heroku, Fly.io, Cloudflare, Fastly, GoDaddy, Newfold, Hostinger, IONOS, SiteGround, WP Engine, Verisign, Let's Encrypt, Twilio, Bandwidth and the others, with no single provider as the model, and how you'd build it, extending one core data model chapter by chapter.
It reads in seventeen parts, plus a reference. The Business: the parties, every way providers earn, how big they are, the core data model, the provider landscape, accounts and resellers, and a dated timeline from bare metal to cloud and back. The Stack, Bottom to Top: data centers, dedicated servers, data center networking, virtualization, shared hosting isolation, containers, schedulers, microVMs, functions and edge compute, storage, regions and cells, hybrid cloud and repatriation. Kubernetes: its architecture, managed offerings, networking, storage, packaging and GitOps, multi-tenancy and policy, autoscaling and cost, and the alternatives. Managed Services: databases, serverless and edge databases, queues and streaming, observability, and open source and the clouds. Deployment: how code got to servers, platforms taking over the deploy, and PaaS and frontend clouds. CI/CD Platforms: how CI began, the platform business, runners, continuous delivery, artifacts and registries, and pipeline supply-chain security. Infrastructure as Code: CFEngine and Puppet, Chef, Ansible and Salt, Packer, Terraform and OpenTofu, and testing, policy and secrets. Homelab: hardware, storage, hypervisors, networks, routing, self-hosted apps, exposing services, AI at home, and the move to colocation. Web Hosting: how it makes money, cPanel and WHM, panel licensing, managed WordPress, backups and migrations, and email hosting. Domains and DNS: ICANN and registries, EPP, the domain lifecycle, transfers and locks, registration data, DNS abuse, disputes, new gTLDs, and DNS hosting. Certificates: the Web PKI, ACME at scale, and shorter lifetimes and distrust. The Edge: the business, networks and IP addresses, caching, TLS, DDoS, and WAF and bots. Communications Platforms: the CPaaS business, numbers and porting, texting registration, sending a text, voice, telecom duties, fraud, email sending and inbox rules. Metering and Billing: metering and rating, pricing catalogs, free tiers and credits, commitments and marketplaces, renewal law, invoices and suspension, tax, SLAs, and FinOps. Abuse, Trust and the Law: abuse on infrastructure, stolen keys, conduits and blocking orders, sanctions, and law enforcement. Market Rules and Compliance: compliance programs, egress and switching, competition cases, and licensing disputes. Running the Provider: architecture, GPU and AI clouds, where AI runs, outages and status pages, operating metrics, and end of life. Reference: a glossary of every term, grouped by part.
The Business
- 01The Hosting & Cloud BusinessHow companies that rent out infrastructure work: the parties, every way they earn, how big they are, four lifecycles, and the core data model.36 min
- 02The Provider LandscapeHyperscalers, developer clouds, European providers, PaaS, web hosts, registrars, edge networks and CPaaS: who sells what, who resells whom, and what to build.12 min
- 03Accounts, Organizations & ResellersAccount hierarchies across clouds and hosts, IAM and API keys, reseller and white-label models, and account standing from warning to suspension and closure.13 min
- 04From Bare Metal to Cloud: The TimelineDated eras of hosting from colocation to virtualization, cloud, containers, serverless and back to hybrid, with deployment and IaC milestones.12 min
Managed Services
- 05Managed DatabasesRDS to Aurora's log-structured storage, DynamoDB, Spanner, Atlas and managed caches: how they work, how they meter, extended support fees and lock-in.21 min
- 06Serverless & Edge DatabasesNeon, Supabase, PlanetScale, D1, Turso, Workers KV, Durable Objects, Hyperdrive and Upstash: consistency, branching, scale to zero and pricing per row.21 min
- 07Managed Queues & StreamingSQS to Kafka as a service: managed brokers, buses, logs and realtime pub/sub, what delivery guarantees cover, and pricing by message, byte and broker-hour.25 min
- 08Observability PlatformsDatadog, New Relic, Grafana, Honeycomb, Dynatrace and cloud monitoring: OpenTelemetry, pricing by host, gigabyte and cardinality, and bill shock.21 min
- 09Open Source & the CloudsThe license wars: SSPL, Elastic and OpenSearch, Redis and Valkey, HashiCorp and OpenTofu, NATS, each side's case, and foundations as the settlement.16 min
Deployment
- 10How Code Got to ServersFTP, FTPS and SFTP, the panel file manager, rsync and Capistrano: how code reached hosted servers before platforms owned the deploy, and its credentials.12 min
- 11Platforms Take Over the DeployGit push and buildpacks, twelve-factor, releases and rollback, previews, immutable URLs and aliases, GitOps and edge deploys: the deploy as a platform object.13 min
- 12PaaS & Frontend CloudsWhat platforms resell, how they meter (CPU time, memory, requests, credits), spend caps and pauses, Heroku's lifecycle, and where the hyperscaler shows through.11 min
CI/CD Platforms
- 13From Tinderbox to Jenkins: How CI BeganTinderbox, CruiseControl, TeamCity, Hudson and the Jenkins rename, Bamboo, Travis CI and hosted CI, then the code hosts absorbing it: dated to primary sources.11 min
- 14The CI/CD Platform BusinessWho sells build minutes and how: per-minute SKUs, credits, parallel jobs and cost factors, OS multipliers, open-source free tiers, funding and shutdowns.11 min
- 15Runners & Build InfrastructureHosted, hybrid and self-hosted runners, ephemeral VMs and microVMs, autoscaling, macOS fleets, caches, remote execution and the faster-runner vendors.10 min
- 16Continuous Delivery PlatformsCodeDeploy, Spinnaker, Argo, Harness and Octopus; progressive delivery and feature flags as products; and how approvals and protection gate a deploy.9 min
- 17Artifacts & RegistriesDocker Hub's pull limits and reversals, GHCR, ECR, the Container Registry shutdown, Artifactory, Nexus, npm and PyPI, and what storing artifacts costs.10 min
- 18Pipeline Supply-Chain SecurityThe CI breaches from SolarWinds to Shai-Hulud and the controls they produced: OIDC federation, pinning, SLSA, Sigstore, trusted publishing and SBOMs.12 min