Killing 10 years old droplet
About two weeks ago, I tried to update my blogs that are running on a Digital Ocean's droplet. The blog is not really active. I rarely write, but I intended to do more writing; therefore, I did the update. I do update once in a while, every couple of months or years. Previously, it was fine, but this time after the update, I can't connect to the droplet. It can start but the blogs seem not running and I can't ssh to the instance.
Since I busy with work I just let it alone. In some days, I start an attempt to get at least the blog and database backup. Thankfully I successfully made the backup via recovery console. Initially I tried to resurrect the droplet. When I am trying to do I was stunned for a bit looking that this droplet is more than 10 years old! It was booted first time when Ubuntu was in 14.04 version. The blog traffic is not busy but I am still quite amazed on how long it stay running. I paid around $13 per month. Not too expensive but not too cheap either.
I drop the idea to resurrect the droplet but instead create another droplet and restore the blogs and the database. While doing this I also thinking to modernise the infrastructure setup. As I said the droplet was created 10 years ago. Probably the early days of docker or even k8s. Of course we won't use k8s for blog. The original setup was two instances of Ghost. One for this blog, blog.lamida.org and another for my wife indrilamida.com. I also hosted a wordpress travelogee.com. All of them connect to mysql. All running directly on top of the droplet. I use an Nginx to route the traffic. Couple of years ago I configured Cloudflare in front of the blog. But that is all. No fancy thing. Everything running fine until I broke it two weeks ago.
The infrastructure modernation I intended was to have all blogs and mysql run in docker. So if I need to update the blog I just have to update the docker image. Docker and configuration will be put in one Github private repository. Add a simple CI that will deploy changes as we push it to that git repository.
Before agentic coding assistance time, it might need couple of days. But thanks to LLM coding assistance, I think I can do the setup, including little bit of troubleshooting when Ghost migration database was failing, only in maybe 2 hours at most.
Now this blog, indrilamida.com and travelogee.com are running again. I will try to write more consistently. Now it is time for me to delete the 10 years old droplet. But maybe just turn it off for now. I will let it hanging around because somehow there are some sentimental feeling on time flow, technology development, my 3 children born after the droplet created, some family passed away and so on. So even a VM can be a monument for our living memory.