I Cannot SSH into My Server Anymore (and That's Fine)

Summary

I Cannot SSH Into My Server Anymore (And That’s Fine) I would like to thank Yann Régis-Gianas, Sylvain Ribstein and Paul Laforgue for their feedback and careful review. To kick off 2026, I had clear objectives in mind: decommissioning moana, my trusty $100+/month VPS, and setting up tinkerbell, its far less costly successor. On the one hand, I have been using moana to self-host a number of services, and it was very handy to know that I had always a go-to place to experiment with whatever caught my interest. On the other hand, $100/month is obviously a lot of money, and looking back at how I used it in 2025, it was not particularly well spent. It was time to downsize. Now that tinkerbell is up and running, I cannot even SSH into it. In fact, nothing can. There is no need. To update one of the services it hosts, I push a new container image to the appropriate registry with the correct tag. tinkerbell will fetch and deploy it. All on its own. In this article, I walk through the journey that led me to the smoke and mirrors behind this magic trick: Fedora CoreOS , Ignition and Podman Quadlets in the main roles, with Terraform as an essential supporting character. This stack checks all the boxes I care about. NoteFor interested readers, I have published tinkerbell’s full setup on GitHub. This article reads as an experiment log, and if you are only interested in the final result, you should definitely have a look. Container-Centric, Declarative, and Low-Maintenance Going into this, I knew I didn’t want to reproduce moana’s setup—it was fully manual and I no longer have the time or the motivation to fiddle with the internals of a server. Instead, I wanted to embrace the principles my DevOps colleagues had taught me over the past two years. My initial idea was to start with this very website, since it was the only service deployed on moana that I really wanted to keep. Since I had written a container image for this website, I just had to look for the most straightforward and...