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Written for people building applications without an operations background. Dated and versioned, and updated when things change.
Deep-linkable sections. Print stylesheet if you want it on paper.
Each guide shows when it was last reviewed.
Nothing in these guides modifies a running system.
The standing note
This is how we approach it — not a standard, and not advice specific to your situation. Anything regulatory should be checked against your own counsel. We have tried to be accurate and we date every revision; if something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
That sentence buys real latitude to be useful about fast-moving areas, and it is honest.
Four guides
| Guide | What it covers | Written for |
|---|---|---|
| Application hosting architecture | The measurement guide. Traffic, utilisation, database working set, bandwidth and storage growth — what to measure, the read-only commands to measure it, and what the numbers mean. | Anyone sizing infrastructure for the first time |
| Hosting security basics | Exposure, secrets, credentials, rate limiting and backups — what, where, how often, immutability and testing — plus data residency, and a sequenced response if you are compromised. | Anyone whose application holds other people’s data |
| Zabbix, Grafana and Prometheus | Which of the three to use for what, getting each running, and recipes for a web application, a database and a hypervisor host. Thresholds, dashboards and verified download links. | Teams with monitoring nobody reads |
| Data centre architecture | What goes inside the racks. Network separation, two-tier firewalling, switching layout, node connectivity, rack elevation, storage paths and backup — with the decisions that are expensive to revisit. | Anyone specifying a room before buying hardware |
| Server room facilities and civil practice | Choosing and preparing the room. Floor loading, power, cooling arrangement, fire, physical security, containment and environmental monitoring, with a survey checklist. | Anyone about to commit to a room |
| CloudStack health audit | A seven-area operational audit you can run yourself against an Apache CloudStack estate, with the API call and analysis prompt for each area and a re-check that must return empty. | Infrastructure teams already running CloudStack |
| A first hosting setup In preparation | A worked example. Linux or Windows and why, a single VM for a small business application, then splitting the database, then a second application server. | A developer about to deploy something real |
Six are published in full. A first hosting setup is in preparation and will appear here when it is written.
Why we publish these
The reasoning is practical. If you run the measurements yourself and it turns out your setup is fine, that is a good outcome, and it cost a web page. If it turns out you have a problem, you arrive with numbers instead of a worry — and the conversation starts at the answer rather than the diagnosis.
If the guides answer your question,the review adds nothing.