Launched: My Own Blog Platform
Goal: fast, cheap, and fully under my control—no CMS lock‑in, no heavy infra.
How I worked
- Started with a BRD written together with Claude (requirements, constraints, success criteria).
- Had Claude render two UI mockups and hosted them on an Anthropic server so I could compare and pick one before coding.
- I set the architecture, security boundaries, and deployment automation.
High‑level architecture
- API on Azure Container Apps (simple, low‑ops, easy scaling)
- Data in Cosmos DB
- Images: initially planned to store in Cloudflare R2, but that required adding a payment method once the free limit is exceeded.
To avoid introducing billing risk for a side project, I instead reuse existing image URLs from my LinkedIn posts directly in the markdown.
This keeps the design simple, zero‑cost, and good enough for now. - Two Cloudflare Workers:
api-proxy: calls the ACA API, converts markdown → HTML, and will add response caching laterui-worker: renders the page UI and composes the final HTML
- Read API protected by API key for now; write/update will use OIDC tokens in the next version
Automation (CI/CD)
- 2 GitHub Actions workflows:
- Infra workflow: creates/updates Cosmos DB (and related resources)
- Deploy workflow: builds and deploys the ACA API + Workers zero manual steps.
Effort
- ~8h for ACA API
- ~4h for Cloudflare frontend + Workers
- ~2h to add a view‑count feature
Current status & next steps
- Current status: read‑only interface; I add articles manually in Cosmos.
- Next up: insert/update logic with proper token‑based auth and a simple admin UI.
- Future consideration for images: if I ever need more control (upload, transform, CDN rules), I can revisit R2 or another object store with a clear budget and alerting. For now, reusing LinkedIn image URLs is the simplest, zero‑cost solution.
Links
If you like this kind of “small but realistic” cloud design, I’d love your feedback.