Cheap yet highly scalable blog

I’ve wanted to create a website for some time now, just a place to share the things I work on.

So first of all, I defined my requirements:

• serverless: Because it’s 2016.
• cost: I don’t want to spend any money on something that nobody will read.
• redundancy: But just in case, if someone is interested in my articles, it would be a shame to be out of service, especially since it’s my day job to manage that kind of thing
• scalability: Same thing, I still want it to be scalable if it happens to work

At first, I wanted to use AWS API Gateway + AWS Lambda with some blogging platform.

This way, I was sure to pay only for what I used, and that would have been a good reason to try out the serverless framework…

But I would still need a database for the content, AWS DynamoDB would have been fine if you didn’t have to pay for provisioned throughput capacity.

At the same time, I was also considering AWS S3 for static files and using AWS API Gateway only for dynamic ajax calls.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t need a dynamic platform, a static website would be enough.

So I came up with this setup :

• AWS Route 53 : DNS with alias to zone apex
• AWS Certificate Manager : Free SSL certificate
• AWS Cloudfront : CDN (required for SSL)
• AWS S3 : Cloud storage
• Jekyll : Static blog generator

I could also have just gone with Github Pages but I could not resolve myself to give up on SSL. It’s a great solution though if you don’t want a custom domain.

Luckily I was eligible for AWS Free Tier, so, for now, this setup shouldn’t cost me anything.