Moving out of AWS

 September 18, 2025

For years, I hosted this blog and several other services on AWS. AWS is powerful, but it is also expensive and deeply entropic. It often feels like every problem on AWS has three different services as possible solutions. Each service has its own setup, and keeping track of everything just gets harder over time. For personal infrastructure, the financial and cognitive cost simply stopped being worth it.

That’s why I decided to close my AWS account and move everything somewhere else.

The first things I moved off AWS were my domains and DNS. After that, I quickly ran into a problem with CloudFront.

CloudFront isn’t an IP-based CDN. It works through DNS instead. In practice, this means you are expected to point a CNAME record to a CloudFront hostname. That works for subdomains, but it’s a problem if your site is on the main domain, like mine at fale.io.

By specification, CNAME records are not allowed at the apex of a domain. Some DNS providers seem to support CNAME records on root domains, but in reality, they just use a workaround. They check the CNAME target themselves and show the resulting A or AAAA records instead. This “flattening” method is convenient, but I think it’s the wrong approach and can be unreliable, so I try to avoid it.

Once the DNS was no longer on AWS, keeping this blog on CloudFront became both awkward and brittle. At that point, switching CDN was unavoidable. Since I had to move the CDN anyway, it made sense to finish the job and move the entire website out of AWS, rather than leaving part of it behind.

Right now, the only thing that isn’t working is posting new comments. I plan to fix it soon by using a cleaner, more future-proof approach that better aligns with my longer-term vision for this website.