I started writing here at the end of November in 2014. At that time I figured out how to setup WordPress on an EC2 container in AWS and figure out how to secure it. From a general devops standpoint it was a great exercise for me to get better with AWS and just generally how you configure and lock down a website. As the years have gone on I have occasionally upgraded my container to the new long term stability releases of Ubuntu as they were released. Earlier this year I decided to do the same and upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. Finally after keeping this container going for 6 years, I just got an error when trying to upgrade Ubuntu. I decided that that point I should just build a new container and migrate the blog over to it. It had been a couple of months, but I decided since I had the whole week off at Thanksgiving to undertake it at that time. As you can see now it has been successful as nothing looks different here.

One of the nice changes with the new version of Ubuntu is I now have support for TLS 1.3 so that is a nice security freebie that has come with the new version. It is also nice that the certbot for Let’s Encrypt is built into the OS. When I originally setup Let’s Encrypt I had to clone the github repo. It was also prior to there being an NGINX plugin so I would have to stop the webserver and manually rotate my certificate every 3 months. Now of course everything is nicely built into the OS, so the certs auto renew for you and apt has packages for everything you need. All around it was a pretty easy update and backup / restore over to the new container. Hopefully this one makes it 6 years like the previous.