How I decided on the technology behind the blog

Posted Mar 2, 2022

By Alejandro Lazaro Chueca

views 9 min read

Last updated: I have migrated my website from AWS Amplify Hosting to Terraform + S3 + CloudFront + AWS Certificate Manager + Developer Tools.

1. Introduction

My technology approach is as follows:

Use AWS resources when possible.
- One of the reasons for creating this blog is to practice with AWS.
- As a first step, the blog itself must use AWS resources.
- However, as a good rule, there is an exception
  GitHub is used as code repository because I want to share my code easily in a public way.
Serverless architecture
I applied the separation of concerns design principle to the frontend and backend.
- Frontend: Static website generated with Jekyll and deployed with AWS Amplify
  - Code here
- Backend: AWS resources deployed with CDK using the TypeScript language
  - Code here
This is the architecture of my blog:
- Previous Version [1]:
- Current Version [2]:

2. Frontend

2.1. Technology to create the blog

First of all, I needed to choose how to create the blog, and nowadays there are a lot of options to do it in a serverless way:

Single Page Application (SPA): React, Angular, Vue.js, Ionic, Ember
Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Express.js, Next.js, Nux.js, Gatsby.js
Static Site Generator (SSG): Gatsby, Next.js, Nuxt.js, Hugo, Jekyll, Hexo
Progressive Web Apps (PWA): React, Angular, Vue.js, Preact, PWABuilder

Since I wanted to keep it simple, I used a static site generator. I hesitated between Hugo, Jekyll, and Hexo. Although I liked Hugo for its fast build times and execution performance, I finally decided on Jekyll just because I preferred the theme I used (Chirpy). I liked it more visually than the other options and I didn’t want to have to customize it too much.

I am a big fan of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) design principle!

2.2. Technology to deploy the blog

After choosing Jekyll as my static site generator, I needed to decide how to deploy it on AWS. There are many options to do it:

EC2 + RDS (i.e. traditional blog with WordPress / Ghost + Gatsby / …)
LightSail (by the way, an interesting article comparing LightSail with EC2)
Container solutions (ECS/EKS)
AWS ElasticBeanstalk
S3
AWS Amplify

2.2.1. Version 1

But since I wanted it serverless and simple, in v1 (until March 5, 2023) I used AWS Amplify to help me with this point.

What is AWS Amplify? (Explained by AWS)
AWS Amplify is a set of purpose-built tools and features that enables frontend web and mobile developers to quickly and easily build full-stack applications on AWS.
Amplify provides two services: Amplify Hosting and Amplify Studio.
Amplify Hosting provides a git-based workflow for hosting full-stack serverless web apps with continuous deployment.
Amplify Studio is a visual development environment that simplifies the creation of scalable, full-stack web and mobile apps. Use Studio to build your frontend UI with a set of ready-to-use UI components, create an app backend, and then connect the two together.

AWS Amplify is a fast and easy way to develop and deploy reliable and scalable mobile and web applications on AWS.

I used Amplify Hosting for the following reasons (there are more, but the following are important to me):

Serverless (uses S3 and CloudFront behind the scenes)
Integrates with my existing code in GitHub
Supports Jekyll (my static site generator)
Manage the CI/CD of my application
Easy way to connect my application with my custom domain
Instant cache invalidations in new versions
Integrated with Amazon CloudWatch

As you can see, this solution is awesome if you want AWS to manage for you the CI/CD, web, cache, the certificate of your domain…

2.2.2. Version 2 [Current version]

Version 1, using Amplify Hosting, was too “automagic” for me and I am here to practice/play and show you the results… so I migrated my website to a custom solution to have more control and access to a wider range of services, which adds more fun!

I created the infrastructure using Terraform with the following AWS services:

S3 bucket used as website
CloudFront Distribution in front of the S3 bucket
Lambda Edge to use it in CloudFront, to transform all requests (required for Jekyll web)
AWS ACM: Certificate generation of my custom domain (playingaws.com)
Developer Tools (Amazon CodeBuild and Amazon CodePipeline): to deploy the Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

2.3. How to deploy it

2.3.1. Version 1

I wrote how I did it in this post: How to deploy a website with AWS Amplify Hosting.

And I complemented it with this one: How to add CI/CD to my CDK project.

2.3.2. Version 2 [Current version]

The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was created with Terraform and used the Developer Tools (Amazon CodeBuild and Amazon CodePipeline) to deploy and automate the IaC.

3. Backend

3.1. What resources should I create?

No backend is necessary for a blog. Simple blogs that only have content don’t need anything more than static pages. However, if you want more functionality like forms, email subscriptions, or comments you will need to use external plugins (to store the data somewhere else, not on AWS) or create your solutions.

I don’t want to use external plugins if I can do the same by myself in AWS and practice/play with new services in the process.

After creating my empty blog I thought that it would be a good idea to implement the following:

Contact forms
Email Subscription (to receive blog updates)
Add comments to each post (register it and show it)

Now, I have a basic implementation of these points but I will improve it in the future.

The backend could be integrated with the frontend with Amplify Studio, but I am not interested in doing it that way. I want separation of concerns and manage both independently.

3.1.1. Forms

External option easy to integrate: ~~Google Forms~~.

Custom AWS solution:

  flowchart LR
  A(Contact form) --> B(Amazon API Gateway)
  B --> C(AWS Lambda)
  C --> D(Amazon SES)
  D --> E(My email)

3.1.2. Email Subscription

Used here: Mail subscription
External option easy to integrate: ~~Mailchimp~~

Custom AWS solution:

  flowchart LR
  A(Email subscription form) --> B(Amazon API Gateway)
  B --> C(AWS Lambda)
  C --> D(Amazon DynamoDB)

At this moment, I only store the subscription information and if I want to send emails I have to do it manually. However, in the future, I will automate it, and I will add the option to unsubscribe in the email sent.

3.1.3. Comments (updated January 27, 2023)

It is used at the end of each post

In the first year of my blog, the solution was as follows:

  flowchart LR
  A(Email subscription form) --> B(Amazon API Gateway)
  B --> C(AWS Lambda)
  C --> D(Amazon DynamoDB)

This solution was a custom AWS solution to use more AWS services and although I received some comments and stored them in the database, I didn’t implement the system to display them on the blog.

However, now I am using the giscus plugin:

  flowchart LR
  A(Email subscription form) --> B(GitHub repository)
  B --> C(GitHub discussion)

3.2. Technology to deploy infrastructure

Now, I am using CDK (Cloud Development Kit) and Terraform.

3.2.1. Version 1

Initially, in version 1, I used:

AWS CDK with TypeScript programming language to deploy backend infrastructure using this GitHub repository: https://github.com/alazaroc/blog-backend-infrastructure.
AWS Amplify Hosting to create for me the frontend infrastructure to deploy the Jekyll web located in this GitHub repository: https://github.com/alazaroc/blog-web-code.

Honestly, I did not evaluate other options, since I knew which one to choose and I wanted to be as simple as possible.

What is CDK? (Explained by AWS)
CDK is an open-source software development framework to define your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages.
AWS CDK provisions your resources in a safe, repeatable manner through AWS CloudFormation, but also is available (in alpha phase) a CDK for Terraform cdktf and a CDK for Kubernetes cdk8s. To find all of these CDKs in one place, check out Construct Hub, a place to discover and share construct libraries published by the open-source community, AWS, and partners.

To me, with a developer background, AWS CloudFormation is complex and AWS CDK fills the gap because it allows me to use a programming language to create the infrastructure easily, it is wonderful.

3.2.2. Version 2 [Current version]

However, I have now migrated the frontend infrastructure to Terraform. The backend infrastructure continues to be CDK with TypeScript.

3.3. How to deploy infrastructure

I have written the following articles to explain it:

4. Price estimation of the blog

When I created my blog, with the free tier the cost was 0 euros per month, except the payment of the domain.

Price information by services used:

AWS resource	Action	Free Tier (per month)	Estimation price
Amazon Route53	Domain Registration	$1 for domain	$1
Amazon Route53	Hosted Zone	$0.50 per Hosted Zone for the first 25	$0.50
AWS Amplify	Build & Deploy	$0 for 1000 build minutes	$0
AWS Amplify	Hosting	5 GB stored	$0
AWS Amplify	Hosting	$0 for 15 GB served	$0
API Gateway	API calls for REST API	$0 for 1 million	$0
Amazon DynamoDB On-demand	Data Storage on Standard table	$0 for 25 GB	$0
Amazon DynamoDB On-demand	Data transfer out to the internet	$0 for 100 GB	$0
AWS Lambda	Requests per month	$0 for 1 million	$0
AWS Lambda	Compute time	$0 for 400,000 GB-seconds	$0
AWS CDK & AWS CloudFormation	Free to use		$0

TOTAL 1.5$ per month. Taxes are NOT included.

The domain name purchase on Route53 is annual and is paid in the month of purchase, but for simplicity, I have slitted it into each month. Also, the invoice category is NOT Route53 but “Registrar”, “Global Region”, and “Amazon Registrar DomainRegistration”.

Use Amazon Route53 for Register Domain is not the cheapest option. I paid $12 instead of around $1 for the first year with GoDaddy, but it is worth it.

5. Next steps

I have many next steps identified, but I will put here the ones related to the content of this post.

Update comments form –> March 17, 2022 –> A form was available and comments were recorded in a database
Show comments in the posts –> January 27, 2023 –> giscus plugin has been integrated into my web
Migrate AWS Amplify Hosting to S3 + CloudFront + AWS Certificate Manager + Developer Tools –> March 5, 2023
Automate email subscription

Architecture

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.