Building this website

This site serves as a playground to experiment with various cloud architecture patterns and the major AWS services in preparation for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect exam.

The AWS Free Tier allows me to run a low-cost static website from an S3 bucket, so I decided to try Gatsby, a React-based open source framework for creating static websites and apps. As Gatsby lacks a content management system, I conducted some research and found this tutorial, which explains how to use Ghost as a headless CMS and integrate both frameworks with Amazon's cloud platform.

So this is the initial setup for this website: a Gatsby based site which pulls the data for the blog pages from a private Ghost server that I am hosting on AWS. It allows me to use the Ghost editor to write my blog posts, which means I don't have to git push the markdown files each time I want to publish.

I use AWS Route53 to host my domain, an AWS S3 bucket to serve the static files generated by Ghost, an AWS CloudFront instance which provides free SSL for my S3 bucket, an AWS EC2 instance to run my Ghost server and AWS CodeBuild to auto-deploy the site.

Overkill? Probably. I will continue my experiments with different cloud architectures and cloud service providers for at least another year, so this site may be subject to frequent changes. In the near future, I'd like to reuse it as a platform to experiment with IoT and digital art. But in the short term, it will be a space where I log my observations about building applications using AWS.