This is the end, my only friend, the end
Jim Morrison, “The End”, The Doors (recorded August 1966; released January 4, 1967)
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
This is it. The final moments. Before this post is over, Glyffe will be no more.
As I typed that last line, it occurred to me there are a few links out there which won’t lead anywhere anymore once Glyffe is gone. The four worlds I created, for instance, each have their own URL.
As *luck* would have it, though, there now exist blog posts about those worlds which I can link to instead. In order to do so, I spun up an Apache web server to act as an end point for the glyffe.com domain once I pointed it away from the game server. I then uploaded a .htaccess file to it with the following contents.
Redirect 301 /NkTJrmIFr https://news.glyffe.com/2019/04/23/pulling-the-plug-part-10-linear-love/
Redirect 301 /V1aG4QZS4 https://news.glyffe.com/2019/04/11/pulling-the-plug-part-3-campfire-and-panopticon/
Redirect 301 /N1xZ5-vpX https://news.glyffe.com/2019/04/10/pulling-the-plug-part-2-field-of-flowers/
Redirect 301 /V1M0vZEpQ https://news.glyffe.com/2019/04/09/pulling-the-plug-part-1-the-great-adventure/
Redirect 301 / https://news.glyffe.com/2019/04/02/the-undiscovered-country/I’ve mentioned before that I used Node.js to code the game server. Once I got the server running smoothly in development on eight virtual cpu cores–seven more than it would ever run on in production–I Dockerized the server into an image. The last step was to deploy the Docker image inside a container on Google Cloud Platform. That’s where we’ll head to next.
Google doesn’t only charge you for running your images, but also for storing them. Let’s remove the stored images first (I was in the habit of backing up the raw code the images were created from, so it’s not like anything irretrievable is being lost here).
They also charge you for reserving a so-called static IP address. Let’s release it (this is also where I swung by my domain host to point glyffe.com from this IP address to the address of the Apache server consuming the .htaccess file).
Now for the running server image. It was managed, along with a number of other containerized service images, by a so-called Kubernetes cluster. Let’s delete it.
There’s one more monthly charge left on my credit card: the database hosting, which was with Redis Labs. They conveniently offer a number of export options, but since none of them was particularly convenient for me, I logged in to my Redsmin account and exported the database to JSON. JSON is basically text (Unicode), so saving it was a breeze.
Turns out Redis Labs also offers the option to switch your database from a paid to a free subscription, so instead of deleting it, I went with the free subscription for the time being.
And that’s it. This blog will now observe a period of mourning, during which a dark theme will be displayed.
Thank you for following along as I carried Glyffe to its final resting place away from the Cloud.