Tech Chorus Blog Hosting Story

The Tech Chorus blog by Sudheer Satyanarayana started way back in 2008. The blog has used various hosting technologies and software over the years.

Initially, the blog site used Drupal content management system. LAMP was a popular technology stack those days. Drupal was one of my favorite CMSes back then. The Drupal site was hosted on a cPanel server.

As life progressed, there was not enough time to patch Drupal and its plugins. Upgrading between major versions of Drupal also took considerable amount of time and effort. I moved on to a static site generator. I found and loved Lektor. With Lektor, I managed the content on my workstation and generated the static site. I used to deploy the generated static site to an AWS EC2 instance with Nginx.

It appears that Lektor is not well maintained in the recent past. I had to struggle to install and perform basic content generation. I gave up and switched to Hugo. So far, Hugo seems like a reasonable choice. Hugo provides means to extend and build on top of it. My expectation of the out-of-the-box experience was a bit high. I can live this until I come up with a better alternative.

At present, the site is deployed to CloudFront which uses S3 as origin. To handle URLs in Apache DirectoryIndex style, I use CloudFront functions. With this system, there’s hardly any maintenance required. Cost is also optimal. If you want to use a Content Distribution Network, there’s no choice but to use a proprietary service such as AWS CloudFront. You can still use Open Source to manage the AWS resources. I use Terraform as the infrastructure as code(IAC) tool to manage AWS resources.

I use Github Actions to automatically deploy the site to S3 and CloudFront upon git push.

• devops
• infrastructure engineering
• cloud engineering
• system administration
• blog