Developing a highly scalable blog from scratch - Part I

Why do the easy way?

First of all, I just want to do as everyone does, have a blog and post about interesting things. I don’t know much about anything but I do like software development and software architecture, so I thought, maybe I should write a blog about these things. But, as every software engineer, I do want to do it in a hard way.

First, I’m writing in a Notepad++ which, by the way, is one of the best text editor ever made, and I’m also writing about developing a blog system (kind of inception here).
Second, I want to have this blog running in AWS using whatever is provided as a managed service in AWS, and of course, I want to start from scratch.

Well, this is not going to be an easy task, I’ve been thinking about what a blog requires and I came up a list of requirements:

Must be accessed from anywhere in the world
Must be resilient and highly available
Must be fast
Must permit adding new posts
Must ensure that only authorized bloggers can add new posts
Must allow comments
The posts Must be searchable
Must be indexed by search engines, I mean, must appear on Google search
Must send notifications about new comments to the author of the post
Must allow multiple authors

What now? How do I start this endeavor?

I won’t achieve all the Musts at once, I’ll start doing the basic of the basics, and incrementally improve it until I have all the musts in place.
Let’s start from the beginning, having a domain 😉.
I already have a domain wolf.srv.br, it’s a Brazilian domain with my last name translated to English, Lobo to Wolf. But this domain zone naming resolution is provided by the Registro.br, the single entity in Brazil that holds all Brazilian domains. The first change I will do is to start using Route 53 to host my public domain.
I will open my AWS console and I will create a new Hosted Zone in Route 53.

Open Console
Open Route 53
Click on ‘Create Hosted Zone’
Fill ‘Domain Name’ with ‘wolf.srv.br’
Select ‘Type’ as ‘Public Hosted Zone’

Voilà, AWS now resolves my domain. The last change I have to do is to move whatever DNS entries I had previously at Registro.br to Route 53 and change the Name Server
configuration at Registro.br to define the new name server provided by Route 53 as the master Name Server to my domain.

After the Hosted Zone is created you can see 4 NS entries, these are the ones I need to set up at Registro.br so all the other DNS servers redirect the naming resolution
requests to Route 53.

Ok, now I have a new DNS service providing resolution to my domain. The next step is to create a basic webpage and make it available for the world.
To start, I will create an S3 bucket (add a link to S3 from AWS) to host all my static files.

Open Console
Open S3 Bucket
Click Create Bucket
Provide Bucket name: blog.wolf.srv.br (remember, this name must be unique in the region you are creating the bucket) ** Route 53 requires to have the bucket name equals to the blog URL
On Iten 3 - Set permissions, uncheck the box ‘Block all public access’ (I do want to have this site accessible from anywhere, don’t I?)
Finish creating the Bucket
Click on the Bucket created
Go to Properties
Click at Static Website Hosting
Select Use this bucket to host a website
Type index.html in the ‘Index document’
Click Save

Ok, I have an S3 Bucket, which can hold all static assets, now I want to have a home page.
First, I create an index.html file

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Complicated things</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h3>This is my blog</h3>
    <body>
</html>

Now I need to upload the file to the S3 Bucket:

Open AWS Console
Go to S3 Bucket
Click on the Wolf-Blog bucket
Select the index.html file
Click Next
On Manage public permissions, select ‘Grant public read access to this object(s)’
Click Upload

Awesome, I have an index.html file hosted in an S3 bucket, how do I see this webpage?
Ok, there is an easy way to test it, while you are still in the S3 bucket page:

Click on Properties
Click Static website hosting
Click on the URL just after the ‘Endpoint’

Wow, now I see ‘This is my blog’! Amazing, well at least it seems to be amazing.
Let’s do one last configuration, the Endpoint (URL) that I’m using to access the index.html file is not what I want, I want to access the blog at blog.wolf.srv.br.
To make it work I need to create an Alias entry at Route 53 to resolve the requests to blog.wolf.srv.br to the S3 bucket endpoint:

Go back to AWS console
Open Route 53 service
Click at ‘Hosted Zones’
Click at Wolf.srv.br hosted zone
Click at ‘Create record set’
On ‘Name’ field type ‘blog’ (this must be the same name as the S3 bucket)
On Type, select ‘A’
Select Alias - Yes
On Alias Target: you should see your S3 bucket under S3 bucket group, select it blog.wolf.srv.br (s3-website-eu-west-1)
Click Create
Click Create Record Set

Now I can access my webpage using my domain, happy times.
Let’s continue on the next post.

Output

P.S.: I hope I can make this blog available to you or else, it will be a loss of time.

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Developing a highly scalable blog from scratch - Part II

5 comments:

Anonymous5 May 2020 at 14:48
Worth reading your blog!
Oscar22 May 2020 at 13:50
Hello Loè, thanks for writing this post series, I was in fact, looking to create my own blog from scratch without using any CMS. That way I can learn how to host and build a webpage and create my blog (2 birds with one shot). But before I move on I would like to ask you, h

- How much do you pay to AWS for this basic set up?
- I do not foresee to have many visits in my blog the first months, so how much will the minimum payment be to have this site on AWS without any visits?
- Also is there a way to have the blog on AWS but not open to the public and once ready open it to the world as a way to reduce costs?
Raheem26 October 2020 at 06:17
I'm happy to see the considerable subtle element here!.

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