Low-cost packaged service environments.

I analyse the current and future needs of a person or technology team and propose a set of services to include in the solution, ranging from the most basic (XAMPP) to more complex setups — all on a portable server so your environment is always just a network cable away.

How it's sized

The starting point is an analysis of the team's real needs: which services they use today, which they'll need in the medium term, and how much production fidelity is required. From there I propose a solution that grows from the most basic (a XAMPP-style stack) all the way to multi-node architectures, all on a portable server so the environment is always just a network cable away — with no dependence on the cloud or on connectivity.

Some of the services I usually include

• Relational and NoSQL databases.
• Web servers, proxies and routers.
• Private, secure DNS servers.
• Code management environments.
• Cache, pub/sub and queue services.
• Centralised log servers.
• Docker servers (not Kubernetes).
• Monitoring and alerting services.

Multi-node solutions

For more complex cases, multi-node solutions can be set up to provide truly clustered environments. In these cases a network storage system is usually included as well, alongside the virtualisation nodes, to achieve an on-premise environment that is as realistic as possible.

What it's for

These environments are intended for development, training, demos and proofs of concept. The value lies in having a credible replica of the stack — databases, proxies, private DNS, cache, queues, centralised logs, monitoring — at a very contained cost and with everything under local control. For cases that require a real cluster, the multi-node version adds network storage and several virtualisation nodes to get as close as possible to a productive on-premise environment.

Note: I do not recommend using these low-cost environments for production workloads.