My Experience of Setting Up First Home Server & Why Cloud is Still the Way to Go

I started my career in cloud business in 2017, without any prior experience in enterprise IT contexts such as datacenter, IT operations, etc. As I grew in my role, I started to appreciate the fundamentals of IT infrastructure, i.e. compute, network, and storage. With the cloud, everything is software-defined, a few clicks and resources will be created.

As I developed my knowledge in the technology industry, I started to host and build my application in Azure, using Visual Studio subscriptions, where users are entitled to monthly $150 credit for learning and development purposes. We have the option to pay if the credit is exhausted.

Triggering Moment

I built a monolith application, hosting in Azure App Services happily. I decided to modernize this application to Kubernetes using microservices architecture, purely for learning purposes, even though this is overkilled for this application. Long story short, I developed several microservices and deployed them in Azure Container Apps, a new service in Azure, as a serverless container platform.

I was happily developing the application, and I made a silly mistake when I was estimating the total cost. Azure Container Apps is a very cost-effective way to run containers, as it’s…