Project Platform (Experimental) 🧪

A learning journey into building cloud-native infrastructure for Go.

Project Platform is an experimental project where we are exploring how to build a hosting environment for Go applications. It is not a finished product, but a sandbox for learning about Kubernetes, serverless patterns, and infrastructure-as-code.

Important

Learning Project: This is a work in progress and is currently used for educational purposes. It is not intended for production use. We are figuring things out as we go!

🎯 Learning Goals

• Go & Kubernetes: Understanding how to build and orchestrate Go services effectively.
• Immutable Infrastructure: Using Packer to build hardened "Golden Images" for instant Terraform scaling.
• Private Networking & Security: Securing cluster access with Tailscale and hardening workloads with gVisor, KubeArmor, and Kyverno.
• Serverless Patterns: Experimenting with Knative for "scale to zero" and event-driven architectures.
• Observability: Setting up and tuning the VictoriaMetrics, Loki, Grafana, and Fluent Bit stack.
• GitOps: ArgoCD and Sealed Secrets for secure declarative application management.

🛠 Experimental Stack

This stack represents what we are currently playing with:

Backend & API

• Language: Go 1.22+
• Build Tools: ko,Docker, & Potential Buildpacks
• API Framework: ConnectRPC (Protobuf)
• Database: PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG)
• Auth: WorkOS (OIDC)

Frontend

• Markup: Go + HTMX
• Styling: Tailwind CSS
• Interactivity: Alpine.js

Infrastructure

• Operating System: Ubuntu Linux (Immutable Golden Images)
• Orchestration: K3s
• Provisioning: Terraform & Packer
• Providers: Hetzner Cloud (Primary) & DigitalOcean
• Serverless: Knative Serving & Eventing
• GitOps: ArgoCD
• Security & Networking: Tailscale, Cilium, NATS, gVisor, KubeArmor, Kyverno

🏗 Project Structure

.
├── core/                # Go Monorepo
│   ├── cmd/             # Entry points (platform-server, platform-web, platform-worker, etc.)
│   ├── internal/        # Private application code & HTMX templates
│   ├── migrations/      # Database migrations
│   └── pkg/             # SDK experiments
├── infrastructure/      # IaC experiments
│   ├── packer/          # Golden Image builds (Ubuntu + K3s + Tailscale)
│   ├── argocd/          # Kubernetes manifests & ArgoCD Apps
│   └── terraform/       # Cloud resources & cluster bootstrapping
├── proto/               # Protobuf definitions
└── RUNBOOK.md           # Operational notes

🚀 Running Locally

If you want to poke around the project:

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/kendricklawton/project-platform.git
   cd project-platform

2. Setup Environment: Copy .env.example to .env and add your local/dev credentials.

3. Local DB:

   task db:setup

4. Run the Local Services: In separate terminal windows, run the following:

   # Run the Core API Server
   task dev:api
   
   # Run the Background Worker
   task dev:worker
   
   # Run the HTMX Web Frontend
   task dev:web

📖 Notes

• See RUNBOOK.md for how we are thinking about operating this.
• This project is a messy work-in-progress—expect things to break!

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Just learning by doing.