RussetLeaf¶
RussetLeaf is a portfolio project: a production-grade WordPress platform, designed, planned and built the way a platform team would do it. It covers infrastructure as code, GitOps, layered security, observability, tested delivery and operations, with every significant decision recorded. This site is the project's documentation: how the platform works, why it's built that way, and how the build is planned and tracked.
The live site it runs is russetleaf.dev.
The three phases¶
| Phase | What it builds | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1. russetleaf.dev | WordPress on a three-node, highly available Talos Kubernetes cluster at home, running 24/7, with the AWS Organization it uses | In progress (roadmap) |
| 2. AI summaries and MLOps | AI-generated post summaries with an LLM gateway, a self-hosted model and a full MLOps lifecycle | Planned (optional) |
| 3. russetleaf.com | The same site on the full AWS production design (EKS, RDS, CloudFront), brought up only for demos | Planned (optional) |
Where to start¶
- Overview: the phases, how the two sites compare, security by layer, the threat model, compliance, effort and the repositories.
- Phase 1 design: the architecture of russetleaf.dev, with diagrams.
- Architecture decision records: every significant decision, with the alternatives considered and when it would be revisited.
- Phase 1 plan and roadmap: the build steps, each with a test, estimates against actual hours, and milestones with target and actual dates.
How this documentation is kept¶
- Written as Markdown in the
russetleaf-docsrepo, reviewed in pull requests, and published here by GitHub Actions; the build fails on any broken link. - Diagrams are written as code (Mermaid, following the C4 model) next to the text they illustrate.
- Each build step starts with a short spec and ends with its actual hours and what changed; each milestone ends with a short retro.
- Planned and built with the help of Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant); every decision is reviewed and owned by the author.