I've been hosting my side project on AWS. I was paying an okay price for not managing infrastructure at all. I moved everything to AWS Ligthsail after my startup credits run out. The project was initially a success and made several thousand euros per month in revenue. Then came covid with new regulations, and suddenly my customers were non existent (the problem it solved was no longer there). After that it was not making me money, I was paying it from my own pocket to maintain it, thinking maybe it will come back. Then one day, after some ignored spam AWS emails, I got a huge charge on my card, along with a bill from AWS. The charge was orders of magnitude higher than the previous charges."WTF??" I said to myself while rushing to log into the dashboard to see what the issue was.

No DDoS, no misconfiguration, nothing unusual. I logged into the root account to look at the billing page, and there it was:RDS PostgreSQL legacy fee ~€200 because I did not upgrade to Postgres 16 (from 13).

I was baffled. I paid monthly €25 (27% tax included) for the smallest RDS instance, then I see this monster fee for something I think should cost maybe €2. I mean AWS just has to run it in a different environment. For €200 I could buy them a new server to run it for me.

That's when I had the realization: "I have a spare Raspberry Pi 3, I'll just host everything on that. That will be for free." But self-hosting came with it's own challenges, especially on a resource-constrained device. I needed better tools to deploy and monitor my application. SSH-ing into the Raspberry Pi every time I wanted to deploy a newer version was a pain in the ass. So was debugging issues. Existing deployment and monitoring solutions were either too expensive, too complex, or didn't work well with resource-constrained devices like Raspberry Pi. Examples: * Grafana/Prometheus for monitoring: Over-engineered for my needs. * OpenSearch/ELK for logs: A nightmare on low-resource devices. * Metabase for dashboards: A ram hungry monster that eats up more resources than if I hosted 100 applications. And to access the db remotely opening a port and putting it behind Cloudflare Zero Trust is much easier than setting up Metabase.

So I decided to build my own deployment and montitoring agent, and why not make it opensource? The agent can currently deploy applications from github by polling release tags, monitor device metrics, alert when thresholds are reached, forward logs to cloud dashboard. It's still in development, with features improving every week. If you are interested, give it a start on Github.