Infrastructure & Self-Hosting Architecture

Overview

Learnille utilizes a self-hosted infrastructure architecture engineered for cost efficiency, operational autonomy, and low latency. Media and file assets are stored on Cloudflare R2 (leveraging zero-egress bandwidth fees), while application observability, logging, and APM are centralized in New Relic.

🏗 Infrastructure Overview

                                  [ Cloudflare CDN / DNS ]
                                             |
                                    HTTPS / WAF Proxy
                                             |
                                             v
                             +-------------------------------+
                             |  Self-Hosted Ingress Proxy    |
                             |   (Nginx / Caddy / Traefik)   |
                             +---------------+---------------+
                                             |
                      +----------------------+----------------------+
                      |                                             |
                      v                                             v
       +----------------------------+                 +----------------------------+
       |   NestJS Server Container  |                 |  Vite React Portals (SPA)  |
       |      (Node.js / PM2)       |                 | (Student, Admin, Instructor|
       +--------------+-------------+                 +----------------------------+
                      |
    +-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+-----------------+
    |                 |                 |                 |                 |
    v                 v                 v                 v                 v
+-----------+   +-----------+   +-----------+   +-----------+   +---------------+
|Self-Hosted|   |Self-Hosted|   | Cloudflare|   | Self-Host |   | New Relic APM |
| PostgreSQL|   |   Redis   |   |   R2 S3   |   | OpenSearch|   | & Log Engine  |
|  (Data)   |   | (BullMQ)  |   | (Storage) |   | (Search)  |   | (Observability|
+-----------+   +-----------+   +-----------+   +-----------+   +---------------+

🛠 Self-Hosted Stack Components

1. Compute & Application Hosting

Server Deployment: Self-hosted Linux instances (Hetzner / DigitalOcean / Bare Metal) managed via Docker Compose or PM2 process manager.
Reverse Proxy / SSL: Nginx / Caddy handling SSL/TLS termination (Let’s Encrypt), rate-limiting, and proxying requests to NestJS server (localhost:3000) and WebSocket services.

2. Primary Database & Storage

PostgreSQL: Self-hosted PostgreSQL 15+ instance with automated pg_dump backups to Cloudflare R2.
Cloudflare R2 Object Storage: S3 API-compatible storage used for storing course video files, thumbnails, document attachments, and PDF certificates without egress data transfer charges.
MinIO: Local development fallback for offline S3 testing.

3. Queue & Real-Time Middleware

Redis: Self-hosted Redis instance backing BullMQ worker queues (email delivery, outbox events) and API caching.
InstantDB & Soketi: Self-hosted Soketi instance for WebSocket push notifications and InstantDB for real-time room state.

4. Observability & Logging

New Relic APM: Application Performance Monitoring agent integrated into the NestJS backend to track API endpoint latencies, transaction traces, and database query profiling.
New Relic Log Management: Winston logger sending structured JSON logs directly to New Relic for centralized log searching and alerting.
Sentry: Real-time frontend and backend exception tracking.

🔒 Security & Backup Policies

Backups: Daily automated database snapshots compressed and stored in Cloudflare R2 bucket with 30-day lifecycle retention.
Firewall & Access: Port 22 (SSH) restricted to authorized admin IPs / SSH keys; public ingress restricted to ports 80/443.