We rebuilt key AWS features ourselves using Terraform for VPS provisioning, and Ansible for everything from hardening (auditd, ufw, SSH policies) to rolling deployments (with Cloudflare integration). Our Prometheus + Alertmanager + Blackbox setup monitors infra, apps, and SSL expiry, with ISO 27001-aligned alerts. Loki + Grafana Agent handle logs to S3-compatible object storage.
The stack includes: • Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics) • Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync) • Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining • Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters • TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible
I wrote up the architecture, challenges, and lessons learned: https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-i...
I’m happy to share insights, diagrams, or snippets if people are interested — or answer questions on pitfalls, compliance, or cost modeling.