So it's been years since my last blog post. Everything started back in 2011 when I published the first version of my Codebeats blog, which was originally programmed in PHP+MySQL. It's funny that my prior domain - codebeats.com - is worth almost 8K USD.
So, this time I've refactored and built this new version from scratch. My goal was to have a CMS platform that satisfied three conditions:
- It's easy to maintain (i.e. no servers, no patching, etc.).
- It's cheap to host.
- It's scalable.
That's why I decided to develop a new version of this blog in React, and to leverage AWS to have an (almost) fully managed architecture:
- The frontend is developed in React + several libraries to integrate with AWS.
- The administrator module (CMS) is a standalone solution built in HTML+Javascript.
- Blog post content is stored in the non-relational database DynamoDB by Amazon.
- The website and images are hosted on Amazon S3...
- and content is distributed via Cloudfront CDN, which also allows me to have an HTTPS site, without worrying about getting the SSL certificate renewed.
And all this costs less than USD 1 per month!
I've also decided to publish this blogging/CMS solution as an open-source platform, so it gets improved over time, while I also expect this to be a fun learning exercise.
So you're invited to go and check the Github repository!