Small and medium businesses are in a difficult position concerning technology and computers.
Most of you are in survival mode to be able to operate.
- You cannot afford expensive hardware equipment.
- You cannot subscribe to enterprise cloud solutions.
- You cannot hire the top talent for 24/7.
Probably an acquaintance or relative helps you – or a small company suggested by them.
- Some of them push you to go to the cloud. Save on the hardware costs.
- Many of them advise you to purchase your own servers and install expensive software.
They may be right, but you can mitigate the pressure on your finances.
IT infrastructure for small and medium businesses should not be expensive or overly complex.
The system should be architecturally sound and stable for future expansion.
Linux – The Server Environment
Linux is the kernel at the heart of many operating systems.
Linux has been free and open source since its first public release.
Battle-tested. Stable.
Linux powers some supercomputers and even the ISS.
Linux is used by top-tier banks, research labs and even in military organizations.
If Linux can reliably power environments of that scale, it is also an excellent choice for many small and medium businesses.
You can choose between “flavors” of Linux: distributions.
Different companies and communities package the system and its tools in different ways.
Debian is an old and stable Linux distribution.
For server workload it is among the best choices.
If you need more information about Linux servers, contact us for a professional consultancy.
Btrfs – Maintain Flexibility
Traditional storage stacks based on LVM with ext4 or XFS are mature and reliable, but they can be less flexible when storage requirements change.
As a small or medium business you need flexibility.
Btrfs is a modern filesystem designed for flexible storage management.
You can enjoy its functions like:
- compression
- snapshots
- quotas
- subvolumes
- efficient incremental backups
LXC – Lightweight OS Containers
When you talk about containers – most people think of application container technology.
You can use OS containers with LXC/LXD.
These are lightweight, isolated systems.
They are not virtual machines, but they behave like them.
With LXC you can separate your services, isolate the processes and mitigate the blast radius of a possible breach.
LXC gives you:
- Independent Linux containers.
- Snapshot and restore functions (on Btrfs).
- Fast container cloning.
If you want to learn more about LXC – contact us for a consultancy.
Text Communications
IRC – an old text-based chat platform. Suitable for ChatOps and alerting for small teams.
Multiple channels, permissions and channel modes make it highly configurable.
A “services” platform can keep the nicknames and channels registered and maintained.
Small programs called “bots” can send alerts, maintain channels and roles.
IRC has a very small footprint; it can run on a Raspberry Pi.
XMPP – an open messaging platform. With additions it supports 1-to-1 calls, video calls.
Multi-user chat rooms can be configured with basic role-based access control.
End-to-end encrypted chat is possible with OMEMO.
You don’t need a cloud-based communications platform subscription.
You can have all your data and chats locally.
Keep it self-hosted. Keep it safe.
Source Control Management
Gitea is an excellent Git GUI and project management tool.
It’s lightweight enough for a modest server.
Your source code, configuration and sometimes even documentation will be fine.
GitLab has a community version as well.
It’s more resource-intensive, but it can give you more features.
If you plan to implement CI/CD, then this SCM is the right self-hosted choice.
Automation
Ansible is a standard today to automate the configuration management of Linux servers.
It can deploy, configure and maintain operating systems, services, containers and virtual machines.
For any small or medium business proper automation is a must from the start.
Monitoring
Nagios is an old and trusted monitoring framework.
It keeps an eye on your system when no one is there.
It can alert operators before small problems become major outages.
With well-planned monitoring the system can keep an eye on its own health.
Backup
Without a reliable backup solution a small system issue can cause a huge disaster.
There are many mature open source backup solutions.
Borg Backup is one of the most established choices.
- deduplication
- compression
- retention policies
- encryption
It’s not enough to take backups.
Test/validate them regularly.
A wrong backup is the same as no backup.
More Tools
The mentioned tools are just the foundation.
Small and medium businesses should take advantage of the free and open source ecosystem.
You don’t necessarily need an enterprise-sized IT budget.
You need careful architectural planning.
A stack that can scale.
A system that grows with your business.
What you build today will be with you for years.
Final Thoughts
For a modern small or medium business IT and computer systems are crucial.
The architecture and its documentation must be the solid ground for growth.
If you:
- run a small or medium business,
- want to improve your IT foundation,
- need help planning your system architecture, or
- would like an independent review,
reach out to us for a one-to-one consultancy.
Tom's IT Cafe 