awsome
It's been quite some time, and quite a lot's changed. Life update, I'm back in the bay now and now working at AWS. I'm writing this post to note down some interesting changes that are happening to my projects, including this site. As an AWS learning exercise and a way to more consistently organize my projects, I've decided to move everything to AWS.
I think this is pretty straightforward, but I'm making some things a bit more complicated than necessary, partially to keep costs low and partially to learn new things. Let's take this first project, this rails site, as an example that I've successfully migrated over. Before, it was sitting on a Digital Ocean droplet that cost about $5 a month. The first thing I did was move static assets out into s3. I had about a gig or two of assets that was stuffed into my repository, and that made cloning quite a hassle.
Next I moved out the database, which was originally just sitting on the droplet. Looking at my options, RDS, the cheapest managed database, was still (relatively) too expensive at something like $15 a month for a Postgres database. That isn't too much bad, but I have to keep in mind that I'm going to also need to support MongoDB separately for THRUSTIN, and the cheapest managed MongoDB/DocumentDB offering started to hit the hundreds, so no thanks.
After some thought, I just decided to run my own databases on the smallest EC2 (T4G.NANO). I put in a backup script/system to upload daily dumps to s3 just so I can sleep easier at night. In the future I'll add to this database EC2, putting in Mongo for THRUSTIN and adding another Postgres database for Functional Vote. For any newer projects, I plan on using Dynamo.
Next, some domain stuff. I'm never going to give up maxrchung.com, so that's always staying as is. One thing I did do was transfer the domain ownership from GoDaddy to AWS Route 53. Not too difficult, I did this once already for s2vx.com. Route 53 comes with some nice AWS service integration, like to setting up trust for SSL/TLS certificates. Speaking of domains, I'll probably give up on the thrustin.rs and functionalvote.com domains and just make them subdomains of maxrchung. I'll probably still keep s2vx.com for now, as sentimental value if anything.
And now probably the most interesting part, I'm moving all web server and long running processes to containers. Originally I was going to try EKS, but it's too expensive and honestly probably too big brain for me. AWS encourages other cheaper services anyways so I went with ECS and Fargate. I containerized my rails project, put it onto DockerHub, and after deploying some container related services, I was surprised things just kind of worked.
Did I mention I'm using CDK? I'm still pretty new to Cloud Formation templates and CDK, but I'm loving the IaC capabilities so far. You can check out all my project and CDK related code below:
Next up, time to migrate my other projects. Since I've done this once already, it should be easier now. For THRUSTIN, I'll move the frontend probably to Amplify, the backend to Fargate, and the database to my EC2. For Functional Vote, I'll do the same thing.
Bulma Activated
I redid the navbar and refactored a lot of my CSS stylesheets with SASS. Bulma's pretty interesting. It seems like a lighter weight Bootstrap and works/looks pretty good out of the box. I like that it's CSS-only, and I think CSS frameworks should aim to be that. Bootstrap's jQuery dependency can make it kind of heavy and sometimes weird to work with in a JS framework. Bulma may be a bit too numbed down for me though, I miss having bloated CSS utilities everywhere to make my life easier.
We'll see, but I may do more deep diving with Bulma and overhaul more parts of this site. A lot of my existing posts are using custom CSS classes I previously made though, so these will probably have to stay intact.
HTTPS
I'm gonna be starting a new job soon that uses Ruby on Rails, so as part of re-learning that, I'm going to be revisiting some of my (I guess now really old) work done on this site. Where possible, I'll also try and update the site to be better and shinier.
Yesterday, I added in HTTPS support, courtesy of Let's Encrypt. I also updated all of the server packages and gems. Updating everything led to some... errors, but I think that's all sorted out now. Next, I may take a look at styling, maybe adopt a random new CSS framework to try things out. Bulma looks interesting.
Holy Moly
I'm typing out here.
The F-boy Is Coming
