Jhonatan Arenas 🎨
Explore a curated selection of my projects and case studies that showcase my ability to turn ideas into impactful digital products.
Client For:
Personal Infrastructure Engineering Practice
Services:
VPS provisioning, Docker-based orchestration, SSL automation with Let’s Encrypt, Reverse proxy management (Traefik), Open-source platform deployment, Infrastructure hardening
https://www.jarenass.comOverview
Designed and operate a self-hosted infrastructure platform on a single VPS using Dokploy (Docker Swarm-based) as orchestration layer. The platform hosts multiple production-ready and experimental services, including a Next.js personal website, a NestJS backend for secure email handling and CAPTCHA validation, and an on-premise deployment of Reactive Resume (rxresu.me).
Challenges
Operating self-managed infrastructure requires balancing automation simplicity with production-grade reliability. While Dokploy abstracts many orchestration details, understanding Docker networking, TLS termination, resource management, and service isolation was essential to ensure stability and security.
Production-Grade TLS & Domain Management
- Challenge: Ensuring secure HTTPS configuration for multiple services without relying on third-party hosting platforms.
- Solution: Configured automated Let’s Encrypt certificate issuance via Dokploy (Traefik-based), enabling secure multi-domain deployments with minimal manual overhead.
Container Orchestration & Networking
- Challenge: Running multiple containerized services on a single VPS while maintaining isolation and predictable networking behavior.
- Solution: Leveraged Docker-based orchestration through Dokploy, defined service boundaries, and validated internal networking across application containers.
Deployment Simplicity vs Infrastructure Control
- Challenge: Balancing ease of deployment with deeper understanding of infrastructure layers (proxy, TLS, containers, DNS).
- Solution: Used Dokploy as an abstraction layer while still understanding underlying Docker and Traefik behavior, allowing troubleshooting beyond the UI when required.
Open-Source Platform Deployment
- Challenge: Deploying and maintaining open-source tools (Reactive Resume, NestJS services) in a controlled VPS environment.
- Solution: Configured container builds, environment variables, and service exposure strategies to run self-hosted applications securely and reproducibly.
Results/Conclusion:
Established a stable, cost-efficient self-hosted platform capable of running production web applications and open-source services with automated TLS, container orchestration, and minimal operational overhead. Strengthened practical DevOps and infrastructure engineering capabilities beyond application development.
