After a series of failures hosting my blogs that ran on my ’experimental’ servers that were always a playground for new and oft-breaking changes, I decided I needed to do something a little bit differnet. After being inspired by the static sites of some people at work, I decided I wanted to give Jekyll a go and see what I thought. Having recently had a great interest in learning about AWS, I decided to use exclusively AWS services for the automatic build and deploy of the site as well as the hosting.

Although AWS ECS is not really designed to run stateful apps, sometimes you’ve got no choice. I ran into one of these situations recently where I wanted to run an IRC bot called Limnoria which didn’t rely on any standard database that I could get managed from any cloud provider like AWS. Instead, the data was stored in the filesystem in various flat-file formats. Obviously, it was not feasable to have the data lost across ECS instances, so I needed to find ’true’ persistent storage.