Aws

After years of using Wordpress, and well not really using Wordpress but just using it to generate a static web site to host from S3/CloudFront, I’ve finally switched to Hugo, which is actually designed for building a static web site. Even got me to play around with AWS’s CodeCommit & CodeBuild to store its history and build everything when changed. If you’re seeing this, then I guess it worked.

I tried to keep most URLs the same, but couldn’t be bothered to configure or set up redirects for absolutely everything, so archive pages and the RSS feed and such use different URLs now. But I don’t think anyone actually reads this site regularly anyway.

I’d been looking for a way to renew my Let’s Encrypt TLS/SSL certificates via AWS Lambda (using DNS authentication by updating Route 53) rather than web authentication. This project started since I wanted to separate out my mail server from my web server, and while I suppose I could run Apache (or whatever) on the mail server just to be able to request certificates it seems kind of silly, and this sort of automatic run-a-piece-of-code-occasionally scenario seemed like the perfect chance to use AWS Lambda.

I expected this to be a common & solved problem, but in my searching around the Internet I didn’t really see exactly what I was looking for. There were some solutions out there, but they seemed overly complicated for just “renew my certificates every two months”, and some were out of date (not even updated to the ACME v2 protocol). So I figured I’d need to write at least some code myself.

I’m pleased to announce the creation of GUID as a Service, bringing creation of Globally Unique Identifiers into the “cloud” era. This has been a fun hobby project to learn about AWS API Gateway and Lambda, and so I figured I’d make a little thing and share it with the world, just because I can.

After many many years having my domain happily hosted by GeekISP, I’ve taken the plunge and moved to hosting on Amazon Web Services. While it’s a bit more work having a whole virtual server than just using shared hosting (particularly for email, as apparently only masochists run their own email server nowadays), it’s the kind of infrastructure setup I freakishly enjoy. This web site and my email now support TLS (thanks to Let’s Encrypt), IPv6 (finally catching on in the world after well over a decade of “coming soon”), and all data more-or-less in my control (on Amazon’s systems, but encrypted in transit and at rest).