Building a DevOps Blog with Hugo and AWS: A Practical Guide
Introduction As a DevOps Engineer, I believe in practicing what I preach. When I decided to start this blog, I wanted to use it as a real-world example of DevOps principles in action. This post documents how I built the very site you’re reading, using Hugo for static site generation and AWS for hosting. Why This Tech Stack? Hugo: The Developer’s Choice Speed: Builds sites in milliseconds, not minutes Simplicity: Write in Markdown, deploy as HTML SEO-friendly: Optimized out of the box Themes: Professional themes available No database: Static = secure and fast AWS: The DevOps Playground Cost-effective: ~$3-5/month for a personal blog Global performance: CloudFront CDN Scalability: Handles traffic spikes automatically Learning opportunity: Hands-on AWS experience Infrastructure as Code: Everything versioned and reproducible Architecture Overview ┌─────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ GitHub Repo │───▶│ GitHub Actions │───▶│ S3 Bucket │ │ (Hugo Site) │ │ (CI/CD) │ │ (Static Host) │ └─────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ │ ▼ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ serloaiza.com │◀───│ Route 53 │◀───│ CloudFront │ │ (Your Site) │ │ (DNS) │ │ (CDN) │ └─────────────────┘ └──────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ Step 1: Hugo Setup Installation # macOS brew install hugo # Verify installation hugo version Create the Site hugo new site serloaiza-blog cd serloaiza-blog Add a Theme I chose PaperMod for its clean design and DevOps blog-friendly features: ...