Recently I achieved a certification in AWS that I have been working on for months, the AWS Solutions Architect – Professional. Of course there are specialty certifications that focus on specific areas in more details but for right now I feel complete in my AWS certification journey. While AWS is still the biggest public cloud, Microsoft Azure is not far behind. Now I learn best by doing and I also feel that is one of the greatest aspects of the public cloud is that its not too expensive to try things out for yourself in a personal lab. So this website and its technology stack was a primary way for me to learn about things in AWS so I figure to bolster my multi-cloud skills I should migrate over to Azure which I have since completed.
Obviously the migration aspect is a big learning experience, and also a big part of my professional career. Thankfully I didn’t have the red tape of change management or people unhappy with downtime, since hardly anyone even reads this blog. I selected Azure’s App Service running PHP for kind of a PaaS approach. I used git to push my existing WordPress code to Azure DevOps which integrates nicely with other Azure offerings including App Service. Its out of the box pipeline config tests and deploys your code once it gets a new commit.
For the database I did a mysqldump from the RDS instance and imported into Azure Database for MySQL server. The interesting thing is it is public facing but can be restricted.
I also spun up a small Azure Cache for Redis instance, it has 250 MB of RAM which seems like it is plenty big for this website.
I’m a little concerned about the cost of all of this so I set up some various cost alerts just so I can be prepared but ultimately I am undecided in how much I’m willing to spend. I view the expense as an investment in my skills which translates into growth in my professional career. Also the app service instance is larger than the Ec2 instance it was running on but it appears to be faster and does more frequent incremental backups which is a nice plus.
Let me know what you think of the new stack running this site in the comments!
