Foggy cloud

> Customer: "I want to have problem x to be solved by a new cloud product y, can you make this?"
> Engineer: "Yes, of course, I'm an engineer. I can make anything, just pay me and give me sufficient amount of time."
> C: "Sorry, time & money are finite…"
> E: "Ok, so I guess with cloud you mean your data should always accessible, right?"
> C: "Yeah"
> E: "Like a website?"

When talking about The Cloud we're talking about making things invisible. Yet the implications of the actual technology chosen, hidden by that same cloud, matters a lot to most customers: should the application be up and running all the time? Does it matter whether where the servers are physically located (because of data security & privacy concerns)? Don't make it too foggy with labelling stuff cloud-computing.

Image is my own, so the terms at the bottom apply to this pic as well

A somewhat secure Debian server with nginx, Passenger, rbenv for hosting Ruby on Rails with mail support and deployment with Capistrano

Basically this is a technical note to myself, in case I need to setup another server for running yet another personal Ruby on Rails project. And don't worry, I'm not going to replicate all nice guides out there, just filling in the gaps.

So let's start with the list of bookmarks I follow as a start. Note that in these tutorials mostly a user is used named 'deploy'. Typically I create a user per project and name databases etc. accordingly.

1. Get security right first: My first 5 minutes on a server or essential security for Linux servers
2. Then I get Rails up and running with this how to install Ruby on Rails with rbenv on Debian
3. (in case you want to use the server as your remote git repo too) [Git setting up a …