Ghost on AWS: Email and Newsletter Automation

Ghost handles email differently than most CMS platforms. It ships with newsletter capabilities built-in but requires external SMTP for transactional emails and lacks automated digest features entirely. This post covers setting up both transactional email through Mailgun and building an automated weekly digest system using AWS Lambda and EventBridge. The

Ghost on AWS: S3 Storage and CloudFront CDN

Running Ghost in containers presents a storage challenge. Container filesystems are ephemeral - when a container restarts, any locally stored files disappear. This includes all uploaded images, making local storage unsuitable for production Ghost deployments on ECS. The solution uses S3 for persistent storage and CloudFront for global content delivery.

Ghost on AWS: Core Infrastructure with CDK

Ghost requires a MySQL database, persistent storage for content and images, and a way to handle traffic at scale. AWS provides these through RDS Aurora, EFS, S3, and ECS Fargate. This post walks through deploying the core infrastructure using AWS CDK, which allows us to define everything as TypeScript code

Deploying AWS Applications with Cloudflare Workers and Cloud Connector

A comprehensive guide on using Cloudflare as a security and CDN layer for AWS-hosted applications, with edge-level API key injection

Converting Blog Diagrams to Mermaid for AI Readability

How we converted 24 architectural diagrams from images to Mermaid format using Claude and built a streamlined conversion tool

Automating Qualtrics Survey Data Downloads with Lambda

Learn how to build a Lambda function that automatically downloads survey response data from Qualtrics using their export API

Solving Docker BuildKit Compatibility Issues with Amazon ECS

A deep dive into resolving Docker BuildKit attestation manifest incompatibilities that prevent ECS deployments, including investigation steps and solutions.

Using psycopg2 with AWS Lambda and CDK: Binary vs Source Solutions

Getting psycopg2 to work in AWS Lambda can be frustrating. This post shows you two reliable solutions - using pre-compiled binaries for simplicity, and building from source with Docker for production workloads.

Refactoring Blog Search from Pinecone to Claude

How we replaced vector search with AI-powered semantic search using Claude via AWS Bedrock

Multi-Environment AWS CDK Deployments in a Single Account

A comprehensive guide to deploying multiple environments in a single AWS account using CDK, featuring sophisticated deployment strategies, GitHub Actions automation, and real-world architectural patterns