I am moving off of AWS’s code deploy pipeline to Netlify. There was a total of 0 reasons I needed AWS to host my static site of about 8 monthly viewers, so I decided to move to Netfly!
Deploy with Netlify
I think it was my ambition to get familiar with AWS’s code pipeline product, but it was too complex for deploying a static site. I needed it to be simple. There were too many moving parts with AWS. Netlify abstracted almost everything. If I need testing, I will run it through Gitlab’s CICD.
Before
I pretty much had blue/green deploys online for deploying the static site using AWS’s tools. It was way blown out of the water.
The flow, which I configured and left, went push to master -> http call to aws -> pipeline kicks off -> pipeline does way more than needed with S3 and a host of unnecessary tools -> site goes down for a few seconds -> site pops back online again and is good to go.
After
Could be one of the easiest deploys of a static site.
I quite literally signed in with Gitlab, told Netlify to use the git repo, told Netlify to jekyll build, and everything was good to go.
Using a custom Domain
I was getting errors with my CNAME Record I created on AWS’s routing and I had no idea why.
Everything appeared to be configured correctly, but I continued to get 404’s when going to the devops.itsltns.io addres.
I continued to go through netlify documentation and the web interface and I saw the custom domain settings.
I assume some sort of nginx or web proxy configuration has to be completed on Netlify’s end and it completely slipped my mind. I didn’t even think about it.
In the domains setting of the project page I saw custom domains and just added the alias devops.itsltns.io and just like that everything worked, but I didn’t have certificates working. Configuring those was actually just as easy.
Setting up HTTPS
Configuring https was pretty easy. For now I just imported my keys from the server where devops.itsltns.io was initially deployed and everything seemed to work.
Now the fact that Netlify has my private key for that domain isn’t great, but I can revoke it at any time if I feel the need to.
Problem, Analytics
Not that I really ever cared to begin with, but the one negative with Netlify is analytics is a paid feature. I am on the fence for using google or just forking the $9/month for analytics from Netlify.
If anyone has a good OpenSource solution for analytics, please send me an email. For now I guess I’ll just go without analytics. I never really looked at this site data anyway.