This article aims at listing everything that you need to supply upfront, so that you could publish services on the Edge. You will fully own these services and they will be exposed to and accessible on the Internet.
The article "Cost structure" will help you understand what the needed cost for the respected prerequisites is and plan for the expense.
Some of the prerequisites have the nature of subscriptions, i.e. they need to be renewed regularly. You will find the complete list in this section.
Strictly speaking you don't need any domain names. In fact, your services may be more anonymous, if you don't use one. On the other hand, that might be quite inconvenient. If you like mapping your services to human readable URLs in the address bar of your browser, you'd better register your own domain name.
The server on the Edge should have network connectivity to its Internet Gateway(s). In most cases - incl. the ones mostly described by The Liberated Edge - servers on the Edge use Internet to reach their Internet Gateways. Hence the prerequisite for having Internet connection on the Edge.
The faster your Internet connection, the better. Upload speeds are key. Home usage is expected to be relatively relaxed unless you do video streaming or something else eating up the bandwidth.
If you need to serve high traffic applications, you'd need Internet plan for professional needs. In such cases the Liberated Edge may not be the right way for you to publish your services on the Internet. For example, you may want to go for implementations of more scaleable architecture approaches in public clouds. There you may also benefit from certain PaaS capabilities.
One needs to build out an Internet Gateway that would be able to facade Edge servers. Many affordable VPS with Ubuntu/Debian can be rented and used for such purposes.
The following list of guidelines aims at helping you choosing the right plan for a VPS from an arbitrary VPS/Cloud provider.
The existing guidelines for setting up Internet Gateways on top of VPS use Ubuntu/Debian as an underlying OS. If you opt in for a different Linux distribution, you may need to adjust some of the instructions accordingly.
Some options for Cloud VM providers that have been thoroughly tested and work well.
- AlexHost
- Hetzner Cloud
Publishing services on the Edge requires computing power, i.e. servers on the Edge.
A very wide variety of machines will work well as servers on the Edge.
Look around. You may happen to own an old computer or a laptop that you don't use any longer. That could be a great first step towards building an instance of The Liberated Edge. One that you truly own and also free of charge. Not a bad deal, isn't it?
Some mini computers have been tested successfully over time.
x86_64
arm64
The real limiting factor for Edges at home is the upload speed in between the server on the Edge and the respective Internet Gateway(s). Therefore powerful hardware might be an overkill unless you have specific needs that are outside of the scope of this discussion.
The existing guidelines on setting up a server on the Edge use Arch Linux. If you opt in for a different Linux distribution, you may need to adjust some of the instructions accordingly.