Perhaps not surprisingly, I burnt out on maintaining my domain for the past couple years. After starting a new job at Microsoft post-COVID unemployment, my priorities shifted away from building my own stuff to growing myself professionally.

Once I was no longer actively learning how to build distributed systems the ongoing cost of a Kubernetes cluster was hard to justify. Sometime in 2022, I tore down all the GKE infrastructure and medhir.com ended up as this:

Obviously fairly ugly and sad considering how much time has been sunk into writing this site from scratch. So I finally worked up the motivation to dust off the code and revive things.

updating the cloud infrastructure

My original stint with “blogging” from 2019-2022 involved mostly yak shaving writing code instead of posts. Just look at this hilariously complex diagram of what I was maintaining at one point in time:

Eventually, I became fully aware of how much of a maintenance headache it is to have so much infrastructure. I slowly started shedding layers until I ended up just shedding the entire thing. Coming back to this, I wanted to simplify things tremendously.

I still use containers to package the front-end and API server, but have moved everything onto Google Cloud Run. This makes it possible for the entire thing to scale down to zero when there are no requests, minimizing costs:

This deployment model also provides a similar development ethos to Kubernetes (easy CI/CD with everything packaged in containers, auto-scaling, fault tolerance) with minimal overhead.

So far, it’s turning out to be ~$10/month vs the ~$100 a month I was spending with GKE…don’t judge me! Those costs pale in comparison to how much my earning potential improved learning new skills.

welcome back

considering how few visitors will probably land here, this welcome is mostly to myself. Super happy I was able to get things going again with much less complexity and cost.

I’ll probably still not spend enough time writing, but at least I have somewhere to write again. 🙌🏽🙌🏽