Dora Noda
Software Engineer
Dora Noda is a Software Engineer writing about Web3 infrastructure, blockchain networks, and self-hosting.
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AWS Now Runs an ACME Server: Why Your Self-Hosted cert-manager Never Needed It
AWS Certificate Manager now speaks ACME, issuing 45-day certificates with IAM governance and per-domain pricing. Here is how it compares to running cert-manager against Let's Encrypt directly, and the renewal-margin checklist short-lived certificates actually demand.
The Vendor Ships the Protocol, the Community Ships the Policy: What Coolify's Governed MCP Servers Teach About Agent Interfaces
Coolify's built-in MCP server covers reads while community servers add operation modes, scoped tokens, approval gates, and audit logging — a field guide to the seven governance controls every self-hosted PaaS agent interface should launch with.
E2B Ended 30-Day Sandbox Deletion — What a Self-Hosted Sandbox Should Still Do Differently
E2B quietly replaced its 30-day paused-sandbox deletion with indefinite retention — but the 1-hour and 24-hour runtime caps, the 5-minute kill-by-default timeout, and the sandbox-is-storage coupling remain. A concrete teardown of what those limits cost long-running agent workflows, plus four lifecycle policies a self-hosted sandbox should set differently.
Every PaaS Ships an MCP Server Now: Dokploy vs. Railway in the Agent-Interface Race
Dokploy mirrors all 508 API endpoints as MCP tools while Railway curates ten hosted tools plus a TypeScript deploy-your-own guide — an operation-by-operation comparison across deploy, logs, env, and rollback, and the nine-item checklist a self-hosted Render-compatible MCP surface must clear.
Weaveworks Died. Flux Didn't: The Community-Run GitOps Comeback vs Argo CD's Hub-and-Spoke
Two years after Weaveworks shut down, Flux CD ships v2.9.5 backed by Microsoft, GitLab, and ControlPlane — we audit the comeback evidence and compare its toolkit model against Argo CD's hub-and-spoke for self-hosted platforms.
The Fly-Plus-Neon Stack: What an 8,700 km Gap Between App and Database Really Costs
A real 2026 production stack ran Fly.io compute in Johannesburg against Neon Postgres in Frankfurt. We total both bills, budget the 150 ms latency floor, and price the consolidated alternative.
Ingress2Gateway 1.0: A Scripted Migration Path Off the Now-Read-Only Ingress-NGINX
Ingress-NGINX is archived and unpatched — ingress2gateway 1.0 converts existing Ingress objects to Gateway API automatically. What converts cleanly, what needs hand-migration, and the five behaviors that break silently.
Only LLM Spans Should Cost Money: Span-Class-Aware Billing for Agent Observability
Span-class-aware metering prices LLM spans while tracing tool calls free — the worked cost math, which vendors already do it, and an OTel Collector recipe for self-hosted agent observability.
Mimir vs Cortex vs Thanos: Picking the Multi-Tenant Metrics Backend for a PaaS That Bills by Usage
Mimir, Cortex, and Thanos compared as the multi-tenant metrics backend for a self-hosted PaaS that bills by usage — per-tenant cardinality isolation, cost attribution for chargeback, and owned-capacity footprint, with a decision table.