This is the start of my personal blog.

I will somewhat continuously deliver some thought on what is going on around me in the world of tech and programing.

How is the site built

This site was setup in AWS, using terraform (a declerative language/tool for provisioning resources) for its infrastructure, and Hugo (GoLang based static site generator).

I love terraform for all of its simplticty. I use use it professinally and personally for all of the cloud resources that I provision. I have tried both AWS CloudFormation, and Azures Resource Manager, but I find my self always returning to terraform.

Hugo was just a choice of tools that I heard used by a colleague, and I found it easy to use. Secondly, since I knew that you could serve a static site through AWS S3 with AWS CloudFront in front of it, it sounded perfect.

My second kind of hope for this project, was to explore how GitHubs featuire Actions worked. It’s basically the same as a GitLab Runner; a pipeline that runs on events and checked in code. So, this site is currently being written in Markdown and each time I check changes in to GitHub; my pipeline verifies the code, builds it, and publishes it to AWS S3. When the CloudFront distribution notices that theres a change in an object, it fetches the new content and serves it to the world.

What did I learn

Certificates

At first, I had a domain that was registered with an external (to AWS) domain registrant. Connecting them, i.e. point the domain to the name servers of my hosted zones name servers in AWS; proved to be more dependant on the external domain registrant than I thought. The issues came once I tried issuing a certificate for my domain, and when registring ownership of the domain. So, eventually I switched over and registered a new domain within AWS, and the connection went flawless.