I’ve been working on this for nearly two years. I originally aimed to complete it before my son was born, but he’s now 16 months old. Go figure. Seems like writing a book is harder than it looks. My original motivation was to write something I would want to read since most resources I found on self-hosting were either too shallow, lacked real-world examples like code, or didn’t fully address the knowledge gaps I kept running into.

The book starts with the basics and builds up to covering the full infrastructure stack, with the goal of understanding the system as a whole and eventually deploying on Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a major focus but the content can be applied to any environment. I can't express this clearly, but you should probably check the sample "Jobs and CronJobs" section to get an idea. There’s also a section on best practices, tips, and practical details based on things I’ve run into myself.

It is available for free including the PDF and the code blocks. Yet, you are welcome to pay what you want.

Congratulations, that's an impressive achievement. I've successfully evaded learning anything about Kubernetes this far, but I guess this is a good opportunity to see what I've been missing.

> PDF optimized for on-screen technical reading

PDF isn't optimized for that, like now, reading the article a phone, I couldn't properly check out a chapter because PDF is awful in optimizing itself for a smaller screen

Tried to check it out but can't comment on the contents, because gumroad is apparently the intersection of facebook, cloudflare and google and specializes in serving millions of captcha's, then when solving all of them bluntly tells the transaction could not complete. There is a special place in hell for sites like gumroad.

Thanks for the book!

Can you add a machine-readable table of contents to your book? The Firefox PDF reader calls it a "document outline".

This allows navigation using the outline with a PDF reader.

This PDF has an example of such an outline: https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

Thanks for making it optionally free! I'm going to download it now for 0, check it out, and if I like it, I'll go back and buy it for $50

Thank you so much for such a useful book, I really appreciate what you did! But please add alternative payment methods to thank you, I don't trust leaving credit card details on third-party services

What if I want a hard copy? Are you working with a printer? That would revenue.

The economics of technical print books have shifted pretty dramatically. As far as I know, O'Reilly moving to a subscription model a few years back was partly a response to exactly this — per-unit printing costs just don't pencil out for niche titles.

I talked with several publishers. It seems a 750-page, high-quality printed book just isn’t economically viable these days.

sounds like some nice light reading, thank you

Probably not that light.

750 pages on self-hosting is actually light reading if you're dealing with it daily. The problem space is genuinely that large. Most production ops engineers would say this barely scratches the surface.

Technically "light reading" usually implies short, but 750 pages aside, self-hosting docs tend to be dense enough that page count undersells the effort. IIRC most ops guides clock in under 200.

I have downloaded the book (and thanks for making it free!), I will really love to read this book when I get into college/have more spare-time

Thanks for creating this book!

You're welcome. Please read and share it.

750 pages is optimistic. The chapter you need at 3am is always the one that's missing.

So many pages... Were all of them necessary?

you can just skip parts.

Wait till you hear about Britannica!

750 pages on self-hosting, self-hosted on Gumroad.