Welcome to the Serverless Engineering Log.

This isn't just a simple first entry; it's a technical manifesto. For this very first post, I want to pull back the curtain and detail exactly how I architected, deployed, and optimized the blog you are reading right now, from the initial create-next-app to the live, global-scale infrastructure.

My goal was clear: I wanted a modern, blazing-fast developer blog, fully defined by code, that fits (for now) entirely within the AWS Free Tier, but is ready to scale to a million views without breaking a sweat (or my bank account).

Here’s how I did it.

The Vision: Pure Staticism, Absolute Speed

For a technical blog, static site generation (SSG) is the only acceptable approach. I chose Next.js for its developer experience and powerful static export capabilities. However, a static site is only as fast as its Content Delivery Network (CDN).

I decided to create a multi-layered, hybrid architecture to manage assets and routes, leveraging the best of both AWS and Cloudflare.

Here’s the tech stack:

• Frontend: Next.js (SSG) with TypeScript & Tailwind CSS.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform.

• Origin Storage: Amazon S3.

• Asset CDN (Regional): Amazon CloudFront + Lambda@Edge/CloudFront Functions (for image optimization on-the-fly).

• Global Edge CDN & Security: Cloudflare.