Previously, I ran my website with a PHP-based CMS on a shared host and since quite some time I wanted to port it to a static site generator and serve it off of AWS S3. Finally, I found the time to do it. This post summarizes what and why I did my website as it is now, and what process and tools I used to achieve it. Setting the Goal With my old website running on Kirby CMS for years I had to maintain a shared host that runs it, and have Cloudflare setup to have improved loading times.

Containerization simplifies IT operations and nearly all standard software can be deployed in a container environment. Until today, I have operated GitLab as an omnibus installation. While Omnibus already greatly simplifies the deployment experience, there still needs to be done and configured a lot to run GitLab. Before GitLab supported Let’s Encrypt that even meant taking care of certificate renewal and making sure certificate configurations don’t break during upgrades.