From Azure Functions to FreeBSD

Summary

Putting FreeBSD’s “power to serve” motto to the test.On Thanksgiving morning, I woke up to one of my web services being unavailable. All HTTP requests failed with a “503 Service unavailable” error. I logged into the console, saw a simplistic “Runtime version: Error” message, and was not able to diagnose the problem.I did not spend a lot of time trying to figure the issue out and I didn’t even want to contact the support black hole. Because… there was something else hidden behind an innocent little yellow warning at the top of the dashboard:Migrate your app to Flex Consumption as Linux Consumption will reach EOL on September 30 2028 and will no longer be supported.I had known for a few weeks now, while trying to set up a new app, that all of my Azure Functions apps were on death row. The free plan I was using was going to be decommissioned and the alternatives I tried didn’t seem to support custom handlers written in Rust. I still had three years to deal with this, but hitting a showstopper error pushed me to take action.All of my web services are now hosted by the FreeBSD server in my garage with just a few tweaks to their codebase. This is their migration story.How did I get here?Back in 2021, I had been developing my EndBASIC language for over a year and I wanted to create a file sharing service for it. Part of this was to satisfy my users, but another part was to force myself into the web services world as I felt “behind”.At that time, I had also been at Microsoft for a few months already working on Azure Storage. One of the perks of the job was something like $300 of yearly credit to deploy stuff on Azure for learning purposes. It was only “natural” that I’d pick Azure for what I wanted to do with EndBASIC.Now… $300 can be plentiful for a simple app, but it can also be paltry. Running a dedicated VM would eat through this in a couple of months, but the serverless model offered by Azure Functions with its “infinite” free tier would go a long way. I look...