Architecture Overview

Running a modern developer portal requires combining low-latency edge delivery with extensive storage capabilities. Rather than paying exorbitant egress and storage fees on monolithic cloud providers, DenverNerd couples a hardened public Debian VPS at the edge with an internal NVMe ZFS storage cluster in the homelab.

Edge Ingress: Caddy Server

All traffic enters through Caddy, terminating TLS with automated ACME certificates:

denvernerd.com {
    encode zstd gzip
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:5000 {
        header_up X-Real-IP {remote_host}
    }
}

Secure Tunneling with WireGuard

The VPS communicates with the home lab over a dedicated point-to-point WireGuard tunnel (wg0).

[Interface]
Address = 10.100.0.1/24
PrivateKey = <VPS_PRIVATE_KEY>
ListenPort = 51820

[Peer]
PublicKey = <HOMELAB_PUBLIC_KEY>
Endpoint = home.denvernerd.com:51820
AllowedIPs = 10.100.0.2/32
PersistentKeepalive = 25

Performance Benchmarks

• Tunnel Handshake Time: < 5ms
• Average Throughput: 940 Mbps over symmetric fiber
• Encrypted Round-Trip Latency: 11ms