Last Christmas I finally upgraded my 7 year old Macbook. I backed all my pictures, code, and dot files. But I left one very major thing out — I forgot to copy over my private keys. These were tied to all my AWS deploy keys deployed with Terraform over the past couple of years. This means I couldn’t get into my server to renew my SSL certs, (which for some awful reason that I couldn’t debug), did not update automatically. So I locked myself out of my own fortess, great. But I realized in retrospect that my whole set up to host this blog had been perhaps too close to the metal. I was interested in learning, and so led myself down that direction, but now I have no intention of doing so.

To be clear, to host this site previously, I had:

  1. Provisioned ec2 instances, iam roles, ebs volumes, etc, via Terraform. I had to debug issues with servers not provisioned properly, and to make sure I understood how everything worked, I would destroy and recreate the entire set up several times to make sure it was absolutely turnkey.

  2. Bootstrapped the server by crafting Ansible files that would install nginx, spam blocking tools like fail2ban, and automated cert renewal with LetsEncrypt. Fought with Ubuntu versions not being supported mid development, and the differences between them.

I haven’t even gone into some of my projects, which included bootstrapping a similiar ec2 instances but running a docker daemon with Selenium containers, all struggling on an t2.nano instance as I was too cheap to pay for more. I didn’t feel like running apps in 2018 ought to cost more than a couple bucks a month. I think thats true, but in return I had to move higher up the virtualization stack.

I had already been relying on a lot of AWS infrastructure, but up till now I still felt I was in control over what was happening on my boxes, and if so, I could move compute resources to another cloud provider and it would work. But with the shift to s3 and cloudfront that changed.

This site is generated with Hugo, and there is no reason a static site should need to be served with nginx:) However, I was learning, and none of that was wasted. I’m lucky that AWS s3 makes website hosting super easy. However, it does not support https, which is a show stopper for me. To get https to work, I need to provision a Cloudfront distribution which serves the s3 bucket. Naturally, this was all done through Terraform.

I don’t know what my AWS bill is going to look like, but I expect it to be 0, since this site does not get nearly enough traffic to exceed the Free tier. Out the window went all of my nginx config files and aws policies that I had created earlier. My site is cheaper and much faster, but in the process I’m sucked a litle deeper into the vortex of the AWS ecosystem…what do they call it, causal pleasure?