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Summary

Your setup is primarily IaaS, with some PaaS-like behavior that you are building yourself. You consume SaaS only for external tooling (e.g. GitHub). This is ideal for learning DevOps end-to-end.

Your current stack, mapped to IaaS / PaaS / SaaS

Image

Image

Image

1. Infrastructure layer → IaaS

Terraform + Linode

What you control:

  • Virtual machines
  • Private networking
  • Firewalls
  • Public vs private IPs

What the provider controls:

  • Physical servers
  • Data center
  • Hypervisor

Classification: ✅ IaaS

This is the foundation. Everything else runs on top of this.

2. Server configuration → Still IaaS

Ansible

What you manage:

  • Users, SSH hardening
  • Docker installation
  • Fail2ban
  • Node Exporter
  • System updates

Important insight:

Configuration management does not move you out of IaaS.

You are still managing:

  • The OS
  • Security
  • Services
  • Patching

Classification: ✅ IaaS (advanced, well-automated)

3. Application runtime → Self-built PaaS

Docker + Gunicorn + env vars

You’ve created:

  • A standard runtime
  • A repeatable deployment model
  • Environment-based configuration
  • Health endpoints
  • Metrics

But:

  • You still manage the host
  • You still manage Docker
  • You still manage upgrades and failures

This is the key DevOps insight:

You are building a PaaS on top of IaaS.

Classification:

  • Conceptually → PaaS
  • Practically → IaaS with a platform layer

This is exactly how many real platforms started (Heroku included).

4. CI/CD & tooling → SaaS

GitHub, GitHub Actions

What you don’t manage:

  • Build servers
  • Runners
  • Scaling
  • Availability

You just:

  • Push code
  • Configure workflows
  • Consume the service

Classification: ✅ SaaS

Responsibility breakdown (your exact setup)

Layer Example Model
Hardware Linode data center SaaS (hidden from you)
VM / Network Terraform IaaS
OS & Security Ansible IaaS
Container runtime Docker IaaS
App platform Your Docker conventions DIY PaaS
App code Flask / Gunicorn PaaS responsibility
CI/CD GitHub Actions SaaS
Monitoring UI Grafana Cloud (if used) SaaS

Why this is an excellent DevOps learning path

You are learning all responsibility boundaries, not just one:

  • IaaS → networking, firewalls, SSH, Linux
  • PaaS concepts → runtime standardization, config via env vars
  • SaaS consumption → CI/CD, observability platforms

Many DevOps engineers:

  • Use PaaS without understanding IaaS
  • Or manage IaaS without understanding platform design

You’re doing both, in the correct order.

Real-world analogy (extended)

  • Linode + Terraform → You bought land
  • Ansible → You built the house and utilities
  • Docker runtime → You standardized apartments
  • Your app → Tenants move in
  • GitHub Actions → External cleaning & maintenance service

What your next step could be (optional)

If you want to move slightly toward PaaS without losing learning value:

  • Add automatic app restarts
  • Add zero-downtime deploys
  • Add service discovery / reverse proxy rules
  • Treat each app as cattle, not pets

That would make your setup:

A minimal, production-style PaaS built on IaaS

If you want, next we can:

  • Redraw this as a single architecture diagram
  • Or map this directly to AWS equivalents (EC2, ECS, EKS, Elastic Beanstalk)