This website is both a technical portfolio and a living infrastructure laboratory where I design, automate and operate self-hosted platforms.
Sébastien Clem
Founder of lavallee.tech
Why I Built This Infrastructure
From Teaching to Infrastructure Engineering
For several years I have been teaching computer science courses in a local association.
My classes rely heavily on practical exercises, which means I constantly deploy virtual machines to demonstrate real-world scenarios.
This naturally led me into the world of self-hosting and digital sovereignty. I am also a member of ARN, a community-based ISP in Alsace, which further strengthened my commitment to open-source technologies and decentralized infrastructure.
You could say I have become a strong advocate for open-source and self-hosted services.
The Initial Problem
Over time, my infrastructure grew organically.
I had:
While this setup worked, it lacked structure and reproducibility. At the same time, my students increasingly asked the same question:
“How do you deploy web applications with Docker in a clean and reproducible way?”
That question triggered the idea behind this project.
Turning a Personal Lab into a DevOps Platform
I decided to reorganize my infrastructure and document it properly. What started as a personal clean-up quickly evolved into something bigger:
A reproducible, automated, and production-ready web hosting platform.
The result is a living Proof-of-Concept for self-hosting infrastructure. This very website is hosted on a VM that is part of that platform.
Infrastructure as Code Approach
The platform allows me to deploy, maintain, and evolve web applications using modern DevOps practices:
Applications currently hosted include:
Technical Architecture
Network Flow
- 1
Public traffic arrives on a VPS with a public IP address
- 2
Traffic is forwarded through a WireGuard tunnel
- 3
A dedicated Caddy reverse proxy VM manages TLS certificates and routing
- 4
Requests are forwarded to isolated Docker stacks hosting the applications
This architecture provides:
Project Evolution
The project is currently structured into three levels of complexity.
Building and Sharing Open Infrastructure
This infrastructure is not just theoretical. It is part of a broader commitment to:
The platform is documented to help others understand how modern DevOps practices can be applied to self-hosted systems. Every improvement is versioned, turning the project into both a technical lab and a reproducible infrastructure blueprint.