Ukrainian volunteer cooperative is seeking help with infra setup

Hello community!

My name is Ilya, I’m Head Engineer at The Stone Cross Foundation of Ukraine— a volunteer cooperative specialising in data analysis and direct humanitarian aid. We’re currently preparing to launch a new platform capable of authenticating Ukrainian nationals who suffered terribly from the Russian invasion of Ukraine using the government ID portal, analysis and the necessary processing of the requests, and Visa/Mastercard bank acquiring to enable instant and recurring donations from people of Ukrainian heritage and Ukrainian sympathisers around the globe.

We are currently looking for a volunteer to help raise the Nomad/Consul-based infrastructure with the control layer in AWS and the worker layer in Hetzner. We have to do this to be able and get away with the limited amount of accrued AWS credits and not having to rely on AWS for our egress bandwidth. For this purpose we intend to rely on Hetzner, where we rent two beefy dedicated NVMe servers with virtually unlimited bandwidth. However, we would want to keep Consul servers and some of our services (such as Vault secret management) in the secure AWS environment. If we were to do all of this in managed Kubernetes, or all-in Hetzner, our spending would skyrocket and wouldn’t be manageable for a 100% volunteer cooperative that is our Foundation.

Good news is all of our AWS infra and Hetzner infra can be located kilometers apart in Germany.
The cluster must be capable of withstanding the failure of one of the database machines and a moderate load of up to 10k rpm. (Bonus: thanks to Project Galileo, we now have a business subscription with Cloudflare, so here you would have a chance to work up-close with such cool things as Railgun, WAF, Polish and other business-oriented Cloudflare offerings… something I never had the chance to use before this, and perhaps some of you might find it interesting, too.)

I know it’s a lot to ask; given the aforementioned constraints, our infra might prove a challenge to work, but I sincerely believe this is a worthy cause.

Best regards,
Ilya Kowalewski
Head Engineer, The Stone Cross Foundation