How I decided on the technology behind the blog

TLDR

My technology approach is:

Use AWS resources when possible. One of the reasons for creating this blog is to practice with AWS… and 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 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:

Frontend

I have included the following in this section:

Decision 1: Technology to create the blog
Decision 2: Technology to deploy the blog
Demo: How to deploy it

I could add much more details but I want to keep it short.

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 must admit I hesitated with Hugo, Jekyll, and Hexo, all three options were good for me and although I liked Hugo for its fast build times and execution performance, I finally decided on Jekyl just because the theme I used (Chirpy) I liked 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 design principle!

Technology to deploy the blog

After choosing Jekyll as my static site generator, I needed to know how to deploy it on AWS and, of course, there are many options to do it on AWS:

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

But like I want it serverless and simple, I’ve leveraged 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 the fastest and easiest way to develop and deploy reliable and scalable mobile/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 that AWS manage for you the CI/CD, web, cache, the certificate of your domain…

However, this is too “automagic” for me and I am here to practice/play and show you the results… so in the future I’d like to migrate Amplify to a custom solution to have more control and more services to play with (S3, CloudFront, AWS Certificate Manager, Developer Tools)… a lot of fun is waiting for me!

How to deploy it

I wrote it in this post: How to deploy a web with amplify hosting

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

Backend

I have included the following in this section:

Decision 1: What resources should I create?
Decision 2: Technology to deploy infrastructure
Demo: How to deploy infrastructure

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, mail 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 it “just the same” 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:

Forms (contact form)
Mail 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.

This is the architecture diagram of the AWS resources created:

Backend Architecture Diagram

The backend can also 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.

Forms

Used here: Contact form
External option easy to integrate: ~~Google Forms~~.

Custom AWS solution:

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

Mail Subscription

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

Custom AWS solution:

  flowchart LR
  A(Mail subscription form) --> B(API Gateway)
  B --> C(Lambda)
  C --> D(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 (to the sent mail)

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(Mail subscription form) --> B(API Gateway)
  B --> C(Lambda)
  C --> D(DynamoDB)
```
- This solution was a custom AWS solution to use more AWS services, but only received comments in the database but I didn’t implement the system to display them on the blog. Maybe someday…
However, now I am using the giscus plugin

Technology to deploy infrastructure

Honestly, I did not evaluate other options, since I knew which one to choose.

I use CDK (Cloud Development Kit) with TypeScript programming language to create the backend services.

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, CloudFormation is complex and CDK fills the gap because it allows me to use a programming language to create the infrastructure easily, it’s wonderful.

How to deploy infrastructure

I wrote it in another post: How to create infrastructure with CDK

Price estimation of the blog

I just created the AWS Account, so I will use the free tier.

Price information by services used:

I will update it when my free tier expires

AWS resource	Action	Free Tier (per month)	Estimation price
Route53	Domain Registration	$1 for domain	$1
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
DynamoDB On-demand	Data Storage on Standard table	$0 for 25 GB	$0
DynamoDB On-demand	Data transfer out to the internet	$0 for 100 GB	$0
Lambda	Requests per month	$0 for 1 million	$0
Lambda	Compute time	$0 for 400,000 GB-seconds	$0
CDK & 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 split it into each month. Also, the invoice category is NOT Route53 but “Registrar”, “Global Region”, and “Amazon Registrar DomainRegistration”.

Use Route53 for Register Domain is not the cheapest option. I paid $12 instead of around $1 for the first year with GoDaddy, but it’s worth it (to me)

Next steps about blog technology

I have many next steps identified, but I’ll 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
Automate Mail subscription
Migrate AWS Amplify Web to S3 + CloudFront + AWS Certificate Manager + Developer Tools