Infrastructure

Infrastructure connects and supports all layers of the technology stack — network cables, data centres, DNS, and the cloud. The managers of this infrastructure have significant influence over security, availability, and what traffic is prioritised. Choosing infrastructure is not a neutral technical decision: it determines whose data centres your data lives in, which jurisdiction applies, and which commercial interests you depend on.

Our setup

For us, infrastructure means rented compute in a European data centre. There are three decisions to make:

Providers — not all providers are equal in terms of values, data jurisdiction, and pricing. For an organisation like a union, it matters whether data stays in Europe and whether the provider is commercially aligned with your values.

Server Requirements — CPU, memory, and disk sized for the number of services you plan to run. Block storage for service data, object storage for large files and backups.

Single VPS — a single virtual machine: simple to manage, sufficient for most setups. Fixed monthly cost of roughly €18–35/month depending on provider and size.

Public Cloud — provisioning infrastructure through an OpenStack API: separate compute, block storage, object storage, and private networks assembled as building blocks. More flexible and more complex.

Infrastructure as Code — Terraform for the public cloud environment, so it can be version-controlled, reviewed, and reproduced exactly rather than clicked together by hand.

Once these are in place, the infrastructure layer requires minimal ongoing attention.