After four months of running a fully self-hosted Ghost CMS on AWS, I made a decision that might seem counterintuitive: I moved to Ghost Pro managed hosting. But here's the thing—I kept all the custom Lambda-powered features I'd built. This post documents that migration and
Preparing for re:Invent 2025 If you've been following this blog, you might have noticed things have been quieter than usual. The technical deep dives, infrastructure walkthroughs, and problem-solving posts have slowed to a trickle. There's a good reason for this temporary silence - I'
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
A comprehensive guide on using Cloudflare as a security and CDN layer for AWS-hosted applications, with edge-level API key injection
Learn how to build a Lambda function that automatically downloads survey response data from Qualtrics using their export API
A deep dive into resolving Docker BuildKit attestation manifest incompatibilities that prevent ECS deployments, including investigation steps and 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.
How we replaced vector search with AI-powered semantic search using Claude via AWS Bedrock
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
A deep dive into securely managing user-specific image uploads to S3 using presigned URLs and authorizing access for viewing with AWS Cognito.