Post #1a: Setting up this blog itself

Tossing up a blog is of course fairly trivial in the grand scheme of the Internet, but I will put on my systems architect hat and share the technical choices made when setting up this site.

• The goal: create a simple personal blog on the public Internet.

• Project priorities: lightweight; minimize cost; minimize maintenance overhead; use AWS cloud, require TLS

• Solution and reasoning:

  • Blog software: The first thought was to run this site on WordPress, as it is ubiquitous. However it was not a fit given the priorities listed above:
    • WordPress involves creating a database, which is not necessary for a static blog, and increases cost and maintenance overhead.
    • Instead, Jekyll fit the bill. It has no database to maintain and as a bonus, it runs on Ruby, which I have basic familiarity with.
  • Compute platform: given the decision to run this site on AWS, combined with the project priorities list, S3 static hosting was the optimal solution. Otherwise, this could have been hosted on GitHub Pages free of charge and with less effort. Note that in order to achieve TLS on S3 static hosting, AWS’ CloudFront CDN is required.

(continued in the next post)