How This Site Was Built

Architecture Overview

The site runs as a containerized ASP.NET Core application deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. It leverages cloud-native patterns for scalability, reliability, and security.

Application Stack

• .NET 8 - Modern, cross-platform framework for building web applications
• ASP.NET Core MVC - Web framework for building the user interface
• Bootstrap 5 - Responsive front-end framework for clean, mobile-friendly design
• Docker - Containerization for consistent deployments across environments

Kubernetes Deployment

The application runs on K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using ARM64 (aarch64) architecture for cost efficiency.

Key Components:

• Deployment - Manages 2 replicas of the web application for high availability
• Service - ClusterIP service exposing the application internally on port 80
• Ingress - Traefik ingress controller routing external traffic to the service

Container Registry & CI/CD

Docker images are built for ARM64 architecture and stored in GitLab Container Registry. Kubernetes pulls these images using deploy tokens for secure authentication.

The deployment process involves:

1. Building multi-stage Docker images optimized for size
2. Pushing images to GitLab registry with proper tagging
3. Kubernetes pulling the latest images automatically
4. Rolling updates with zero downtime

SSL/TLS Certificates

The site uses cert-manager to automatically provision and renew SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt. This ensures all traffic is encrypted via HTTPS without manual certificate management.

Cert-manager handles:

• Automatic certificate issuance via ACME protocol
• HTTP-01 challenge validation
• Certificate renewal before expiration
• TLS secret management in Kubernetes

OAuth2 Proxy

For secure authentication, the site can be protected by oauth2-proxy, which provides:

• Single sign-on (SSO) integration
• Authentication via OAuth2 providers (Google, GitHub, etc.)
• Authorization and access control
• Session management

Ingress & Routing

Traefik serves as the ingress controller, handling:

• HTTP to HTTPS redirection
• Virtual host routing for nbucking.net and www.nbucking.net
• TLS termination
• Load balancing across pod replicas

Infrastructure

The entire stack runs on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure free tier, demonstrating how modern cloud-native applications can be built cost-effectively while maintaining enterprise-grade patterns.

Technologies Summary

Source Code

The source code and Kubernetes manifests are managed in a private GitLab repository with proper version control and automated deployment pipelines.