Ghost recently released ActivityPub support, enabling Ghost blogs to participate in the Fediverse alongside Mastodon, Threads, and other federated platforms. Through extensive testing and production deployment, we discovered that the official ActivityPub container has a bug that prevents self-hosted ActivityPub deployments from working. Combined with AWS-specific networking challenges, we had
Ghost handles email differently than most CMS platforms. It ships with newsletter capabilities built-in but requires external SMTP for transactional emails and lacks automated digest features entirely. This post covers setting up both transactional email through Mailgun and building an automated weekly digest system using AWS Lambda and EventBridge. The
Running Ghost in containers presents a storage challenge. Container filesystems are ephemeral - when a container restarts, any locally stored files disappear. This includes all uploaded images, making local storage unsuitable for production Ghost deployments on ECS. The solution uses S3 for persistent storage and CloudFront for global content delivery.
Ghost requires a MySQL database, persistent storage for content and images, and a way to handle traffic at scale. AWS provides these through RDS Aurora, EFS, S3, and ECS Fargate. This post walks through deploying the core infrastructure using AWS CDK, which allows us to define everything as TypeScript code
A comprehensive guide on using Cloudflare as a security and CDN layer for AWS-hosted applications, with edge-level API key injection
A deep dive into resolving Docker BuildKit attestation manifest incompatibilities that prevent ECS deployments, including investigation steps and solutions.
Getting psycopg2 to work in AWS Lambda can be frustrating. This post shows you two reliable solutions - using pre-compiled binaries for simplicity, and building from source with Docker for production workloads.
How we replaced vector search with AI-powered semantic search using Claude via AWS Bedrock
A comprehensive guide to deploying multiple environments in a single AWS account using CDK, featuring sophisticated deployment strategies, GitHub Actions automation, and real-world architectural patterns
A deep dive into securely managing user-specific image uploads to S3 using presigned URLs and authorizing access for viewing with AWS Cognito.