When I first built my portfolio I used GitHub for the source control and deployed directly to Netlify on a push to master. This was a perfect setup, I didn't need any knowledge about #DevOps or anything, it was all just done for me.

One of the issues I had with Netlify was I wanted to gzip my JavaScript files, I had this setup in my #Webpack file, however Netlify didn't offer an easy way to set this.

Over the weekend I decided I wanted to know more about how #DevOps worked so I decided to switch from Netlify to Amazon S3. Instead of creating any #Git Webhooks I decided to use Buddy for my pipeline and to run commands. Buddy is a fantastic tool, very easy to setup builds, copying the files to my Amazon S3 bucket, then running some #AWS console commands to set the content-encoding of the JavaScript files. - Buddy is also free if you only have a few pipelines, so I didn't need to pay anything 🤙🏻.

When I made these changes I also wanted to monitor my code, and make sure I was keeping up with the best practices so I implemented Code Climate to look over my code and tell me where there code smells, issues, and other issues I've been super happy with it so far, on the free tier so its also free.

I did plan on using Amazon CloudFront for my SSL and cacheing, however it was overly complex to setup and it costs money. So I decided to go with the free tier of CloudFlare and it is amazing, best choice I've made for caching / SSL in a long time.

I recently moved my portfolio to Amazon S3 and I needed a new way to cache and SSL my site as Amazon S3 does not come with this right out of the box. I tried Amazon CloudFront as I was already on Amazon S3 I thought this would be super easy and straight forward to setup... It was not, I was unable to get this working even though I followed all the online steps and even reached out for help to Amazon.

I'd used CloudFlare in the past, and thought let me see if I can set up CloudFlare on an Amazon S3 bucket. The setup for this was so basic and easy... I had it setup with caching and SSL within 5 minutes, and it was 100% free.

When my SSL cert MaxCDN was expiring on my personal site I decided it was a good time to revamp some things. Since GitHub Services is depreciated I can no longer have #CDN cache purges automated among other things. So I decided on the following: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Let's Encrypt and Jekyll. Staying the same was Bootstrap, jQuery, Grunt & #GoogleFonts.

What's awesome about GitHub Pages is that it has a #CDN (Fastly) built-in and anytime you push to master, it purges the cache instantaneously without you have to do anything special. Netlify is magic, I highly recommend it to anyone using #StaticSiteGenerators.

For the most part, everything went smoothly. The only things I had issues with were the following:

• If you want to point www to GitHub Pages you need to rename the repo to www
• If you edit something in the _config.yml you need to restart bundle exec jekyll s or changes won't show
• I had to disable the Grunt htmlmin module. I replaced it with Jekyll layout that compresses HTML for #webperf

Last but certainly not least, I made a donation to Let's Encrypt. If you use their service consider doing it too: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

Platform Update: we’ve been using the Performance Test tool provided by KeyCDN for a long time in combination with Pingdom's similar tool and the #WebpageTest and #GoogleInsight - we decided to test out KeyCDN for static asset hosting. The results for the endpoints were superfast - almost 200% faster than CloudFlare in some tests and 370% faster than imgix . So we’ve moved Washington Brown from imgix for hosting theme images, to KeyCDN for hosting all images and static assets (Font, CSS & JS). There’s a few things that we like about “Key” apart from saving $6 a month on the monthly minimum spend ($4 vs $10 for imgix). Key allow for a custom CNAME (no more advertising imgix.com in domain requests and possible SEO improvements - and easier to swap to another host down the track). Key allows JPEG/WebP image requests based on clients ‘accept’ http headers - imgix required a ?auto=format query string on each image resource request - which can break some caches. Key allows for explicitly denying cookies to be set on a zone/domain; cookies are a big strain on limited upload bandwidth so to be able to force these off is great - Cloudflare adds a cookie to every header… for “performance reasons”… but remember “if you’re getting a product something for free…”

Yesterday we moved away from using CloudFlare towards Amazon Route 53 for a few reasons. Although CloudFlare is a great platform, once you reach almost a 100% AWS Service integration, it makes it hard to still use CloudFlare in the stack. Also being able to use Aliases for DNS makes it faster because instead of doing a CNAME and an A record lookup, you will be able to receive the A records from the end services directly. We always loved working with CloudFlare , especially for DNS as we already used Amazon CloudFront for CDN. But having everything within AWS makes it "cleaner" when deploying automatically using AWS CloudFormation. All that aside, the main reason for moving towards Amazon Route 53 for DNS is the ability to do geolocation and latency based DNS responses. Doing this outside the AWS console would increase the complexity.