Website architecture

For 2022, I’ve made a number of changes to the blog:

• Content management
  • upgraded to a statically compiled website with Hugo
  • all historical Wordpress content has been migrated to Markdown
  • a git repository on GitHub
  • a git submodule reference to the hugo-coder theme
  • git-lfs for binaries
• Continuous integration and delivery
  • built using a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner for continuous integration
  • continuous delivery to a secondary git repo containing hugo’s output: html, css, and JavaScript
• Hosting
  • Azure Kubernetes Service
    • content is served via the nginx web server
    • Mutiple web server instances are running in 3 Azure fault zones within a single Azure region
    • the web servers are load balanced via kubernetes aks and ingress
    • Multiple Azure regions are used for high-availability
  • CloudFlare
    • Load balancing is used for high availability and geo-distribution
    • TLS is negiotiated over HTTP/3, HTTP/2 (or legacy) at one of the 122 CloudFlare datacenters around the world, reducing latency
    • Uncached requests are routed to the closest available Azure region kubernetes cluster

Is this overkill for a blog? Absolutely. CloudFlare Pages provide a turn-key solution providing most, if not everything listed here. This architecture lays the foundational for some other projects I’m working on this year.