AWS

Minimize Amazon Cloudfront Costs With Octopress and S3

I learned an important tip that I thought I should share with others who are considering Octopress with publishing to S3/Cloudfront. If the S3 deployment line in your Rakefile includes the s3cmd option for “–cf-invalidate” you should be aware that this will drive up your costs quite a bit. (3 guesses how I know this) I had about a years worth of expected CF costs in my first month because I didn’t understand what that was doing.

Blog Relaunch - All the Cool Kids Are Going Static

I’ve run my own hosted server for many years now. Originally it was just to have my own mail server but later I decided to start the blog using Wordpress. It’s great to have the control and flexibility to do whatever you want with a server.. but there are definitely some downsides as well. Wordpress is great.. but there are constant security issues to worry about and people attacking your server trying to hack it with automated tools. Customizing it has also never exactly been easy.. and it’s a huge code base that I don’t really understand.

So this new version of the blog is far enough along that it was time to turn it lose.

Guns, Wood, and Tripods

![](http://farm8.static.flickr.com/7256/7451269236_55f2df81a5.jpg =320x)

What do these three things have in common?  They were all in my car the other day as I set out to meet with various buyers for all three.  If you hadn’t heard I’m going to be leaving Charlotte soon and heading for Seattle.  After living in the south east for 25 years and here in Charlotte for about 13 of those it’s a pretty big deal.   There are good reasons for doing it though… beyond just a change of scenery.   I’ll be joining the Amazon Web Services team once I get moved.  At first it will be in an operations role to help keep things running smoothly on their gigantic cloud platform and later.. who knows.  They are fairly secretive about their internal goings-on.. and for good reason.  You can just about count on one hand the number of companies or groups operating on the scale of Amazon.  Most people who aren’t in the biz only associate Amazon with their web store but by current estimations the store (as big as it is) is only responsible for a small fraction of their revenue… much of the rest is coming from AWS which was first launched in 2002.  From the standpoint of my career… a self taught, self proclaimed ‘linuxguy’ in Charlotte an opportunity like this doesn’t get much better.