Cloud Finale

I finished the final steps of the migration to the cloud last night -- importing five years worth of DDMSence issues into JIRA Cloud and updating all of the links. The whole move to AWS and related services was much less painful than expected, and helped by the wealth of available documentation that AWS provides.

The final setup looks something like this:

• I had a mail server running for a couple days, but I tore it out after seeing how much of a pain it would be to deal with spam.
• I got a free license to JIRA Cloud from Atlassian since DDMSence is an open-source project, saving me $120 per year.
• Server load is even less than expected and I've never gone over 10% CPU utilization yet. I'm not going to need to scale up the servers anytime soon, saving even more money. The load only spikes when I deploy a new update (with Amazon CodeDeploy), or around 5 AM when all of the zombie botnets in AWS start indexing all of my pages.

I'm expecting the final monthly cost, including the SSL certificate, to be around $32. All in all, this was a fun, painless migration that acted as a good homework assignment to keep my AWS skills from immediately flying out of my head. If nothing has blown up by the end of the month, I'll be cancelling my Kattare account and living in the clouds for good!

Next up on my agenda is to make the site more mobile-friendly. Google is changing their ranking algorithms to bump up sites that treat you like a near-sighted AARP member through giant fonts, brain-dead iconography, and hamstrung functionality, so I'll finally have to jump on the "Responsive UI" bandwagon. I've done just enough now to pass Google's mobile test, but want to continue fine-tuning it as time permits.