Case Studies
These case studies describe the platform as an operating system, not as a design exercise. Each one focuses on a real problem, the constraints on a small single-VM host, the technical implementation choice that was made, and the operational outcome.
Case 01
Problem: A portfolio landing page can look polished and still say very little about whether the operator understands delivery, failure handling, or runtime separation.
Constraints: One VM, limited disk, no orchestration layer, and no room for decorative infrastructure.
Implementation: The main site became the public frontdoor of a live platform with links to architecture, status, source, and running services instead of staying a static self-description.
Outcome: Reviewers can move from positioning to proof: architecture, deployment flow, live status, and repository structure are all visible from the first layer.
Case 02
Problem: Legacy PHP workloads become operational blind spots when they are embedded into a wider site without clear boundaries.
Constraints: Existing codebase, existing data model, and a need to preserve usefulness while improving runtime clarity.
Implementation: DMA was moved behind its own subdomain, container, cookie scope, database boundary, and health behavior instead of being treated as a path-level add-on.
Outcome: The application is easier to route, test, monitor, and reason about, while still remaining usable as a live statistics tool.
Case 03
Problem: Small hosts still need visibility, but full observability stacks quickly become disproportionate in memory, disk, and maintenance effort.
Constraints: 8 GB RAM, 40 GB disk, and a goal of staying understandable for one operator path.
Implementation: Prometheus, Grafana, Uptime Kuma, cAdvisor, Loki, and Promtail were kept on intentionally short retention and bounded storage instead of aiming for long-term analytics.
Outcome: The platform stays observable enough for incidents and review without pretending to be a multi-team observability platform.