My blog has changed again, in two different ways. First, I have moved from Jekyll to Hugo. Second, I have moved my blog from Azure to AWS. So why the changes?
Azure to AWS
Let me start with why I am changing cloud providers. A couple of simple reasons. In fact, they are the most basic of reasons: cost and convenience. I have had a very hard time getting an accurate cost for Azure. I have had months at $5.00, and others almost as high as $13. The price itself isn’t issue. It is the inability to predict the price from month to month with some levels of accuracy. I can always get to the details, but it takes digging. It is just not intuitive.
Then comes the hosting of a static blog. Azure’s storage can serve as a simple static website, you need to move up to a Web App to be a real web site.
While I really like some of the capabilities of Azure. It was not enough its shortcomings, and more importantly AWS can do it cheaper and easier. In fact, it provides a glimpse into the different strategies of the two major cloud providers. Azure focuses on maintaining basic parity with AWS on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and invests in Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities. Static web sites only need an IaaS solution. Azure forces me into a PaaS solution, while AWS provides a simple IaaS solution.
This might seem like an ideological debate, it is very practical. My current anticipated monthly cost is around $0.53 per month. I will be checking on it over the next few months. However, with so low a starting point, even a large margin of error is significantly less than the cost of Azure.
Jekyll to Hugo
This leads to the other change, the static blog engine I am using. I have gotten very tired of supporting the Ruby runtime on a Windows machine in order to run Jekyll. Hugo has the advantage of not needing a runtime, and I can run it on multiple platforms. Further, Hugo is fast. I mean really fast. It just makes my life so much easier. Basically, no runtime issues, and a whole lot faster.
Summary
The short summary of this tales of changes is that I can now generate my blog faster, with less runtime issues, and run it for a tenth the price. Just a win-win for me and my blog.