Just a quick post to let you know where I have been, or more accurately where my blog has been. At some point in June, the AWS EC2 instance I had been running my blog on for a few years stopped working. I did not think it would be too much of a problem, as I have a good backup routine for my blog and with my new AWS Certified Developer – Associate skills spinning up a new EC2 instance would not be a problem.

However, life and a few other things got in the way. the first job was to test the backups on my local WordPress environment (based on the official WordPress image) – all my posts were available, but the last few backups of the “Uploads” folder had failed. Fortunately, I retrieved an earlier backup from AWS S3 versions, and I will be able to replace the missing images from the most recent posts shortly.

The decision that contributed most to the extended downtime is that I wanted to avoid this situation again, by using infrastructure as code to automate the deployment and configuration of an EC2 instance to run WordPress. It was also a good opportunity to get some hands-on experience with the AWS Cloud Development Kit – which more than lives up to the hype, it is bloody brilliant! My plan is to today up the repository I made for the blog infrastructure and to share it on GitHub.

Before I can get around to that, I have some posts to write – a progress report on my goals for 2023 and a new bike check, I am attending a photography workshop in the Peak District tomorrow and next week we will be setting off for our summer 2023 road trip!