Year: 2026

Rebuilding My Personal Blog on Azure: Lessons From the Trenches

In January, I decided to rebuild my personal WordPress blog on Azure.

Not as a demo.
Not as a “hello world.”
But as a long-running, low-cost, production-grade personal workload—something I could realistically live with for years.

What followed was a reminder of why real cloud engineering is never about just clicking “Create”.

Why I Didn’t Use App Service (Again)

I initially explored managed options like Azure App Service and Azure Container Apps. On paper, they’re perfect. In practice, for a personal blog:

  • Storage behavior mattered more than storage size
  • Hidden costs surfaced through SMB operations and snapshots
  • PHP versioning and runtime controls were more rigid than expected

Nothing was “wrong” — but it wasn’t predictable enough for a small, fixed budget site.

So I stepped back and asked a simpler question:

What is the most boring, controllable architecture that will still work five years from now?

The Architecture I Settled On

I landed on a single Ubuntu VM, intentionally small:

  • Azure VM: B1ms (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM)
  • OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
  • Stack: Docker + Nginx + WordPress (PHP-FPM) + MariaDB
  • Disk: 30 GB managed disk
  • Access: SSH with key-based auth
  • Networking: Basic NSG, public IP

No autoscaling. No magic. No illusions.

Just something I fully understand.

Azure Policy: A Reality Check

The first thing that blocked me wasn’t Linux or Docker — it was Azure Policy.

Every resource creation failed until I added mandatory tags:

  • env
  • costCenter
  • owner

Not just on the VM — but on:

  • Network interfaces
  • Public IPs
  • NSGs
  • Disks
  • VNets

Annoying? Slightly.
Realistic? Absolutely.

This is what production Azure environments actually look like.

The “Small” Issues That Matter

A few things that sound trivial — until you hit them at 2 AM:

  • SSH keys rejected due to incorrect file permissions on Windows/WSL
  • PHP upload limits silently capped at 2 MB
  • Nginx + PHP-FPM + Docker each enforcing their own limits
  • A 129 MB WordPress backup restore failing until every layer agreed
  • Choosing between Premium vs Standard disks for a low-IO workload

None of these are headline features.
All of them determine whether the site actually works.

Cost Reality

My target budget: under $150/month total, including:

  • A static site (tanolis.us)
  • This WordPress blog

The VM-based approach keeps costs:

  • Predictable
  • Transparent
  • Easy to tune (disk tier, VM size, shutdown schedules)

No surprises. No runaway meters.

Why This Experience Matters

This wasn’t about WordPress.

It was about:

  • Designing for longevity, not demos
  • Understanding cost behavior, not just pricing
  • Respecting platform guardrails instead of fighting them
  • Choosing simplicity over abstraction when it makes sense

The cloud is easy when everything works.
Engineering starts when it doesn’t.

What’s Next

For now, the site is up.
Backups are restored.
Costs are under control.

Next steps — when I feel like it:

  • TLS with Let’s Encrypt
  • Snapshot or off-VM backups
  • Minor hardening

But nothing urgent. And that’s the point.

Sometimes the best architecture is the one that lets you stop thinking about it.

IDesign Method: An Overview

Software projects often start small and cute, but can quickly become unmanageable as requirements change. This transformation is usually due to the lack of an appropriate architecture, or an architecture that is not designed for future change.

The IDesign Method: An Overview
The IDesign method, developed by Juval Löwy, provides a systematic approach to creating a software architecture that will stand the test of time. Let’s explore its key principles.

Avoid functional decomposition
The first principle of IDesign is to avoid functional decomposition – the practice of translating requirements directly into services. For example, if you’re building an e-commerce platform, don’t create separate services for “user management”, “product catalogue” and “order processing” just because those are your main requirements. Instead, IDesign advocates a more thoughtful approach based on volatility.

Volatility based decomposition
IDesign focuses on identifying areas of volatility – aspects of the system that are likely to change over time. For example, in our e-commerce example, payment methods might be an area of volatility, as you may need to add new payment options in the future.

The three-step process:
Identify 3-5 core use cases
What your system does at its most basic level. For our e-commerce platform, these might be:

Browse and search for products
Manage shopping cart
Completing a purchase

Identify areas of volatility
Identify aspects of the system that are likely to change. In our e-commerce example:
Payment methods
Shipping options
Product recommendation algorithms

Define services
IDesign defines five types of services:
Client: Handles user interaction (e.g. web interface)
Manager: Orchestrates business use cases
Engine: Executes specific business logic
Resource Access: Handles data storage and retrieval
Utility: Provides cross-cutting functionality

For our e-commerce platform example we might have:

A ShoppingManager – to orchestrate the shopping process
A PaymentEngine – to handle different payment methods
A ProductCatalogAccess – to manage product data

Design Principles and Patterns

Great software is not written.
It’s designed.

Most systems don’t fail because of bad developers.
They fail because of bad design decisions made early — and scaled blindly.

This is the foundation every serious engineer and tech leader must master 👇

Design Principles & Patterns

🔹 SOLID

SRP – One class, one reason to change
OCP – Extend, don’t modify
LSP – Substitutions must be safe
ISP – Small, focused interfaces
DIP – Depend on abstractions, not concretes

SOLID isn’t theory. It’s how you avoid rewriting your system every 6 months.

🔹 GoF Design Patterns

1) Creational → Control how objects are created (Factory, Builder, Singleton)
2) Structural → Control how objects are composed (Adapter, Facade, Proxy)
3) Behavioral → Control how objects communicate (Strategy, Observer, Command)

Patterns are not “fancy code.”
They are battle-tested solutions to recurring problems.

🔹 DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself
Duplication is a silent killer.
It multiplies bugs and slows teams.

🔹 KISS – Keep It Simple
Complexity is not intelligence.
Simplicity is.

🔹 MVC + Repository + Unit of Work
Clean separation of concerns.
Predictable codebases.
Scalable teams.

Reality check:

Frameworks change.
Languages change.
Trends change.

Principles don’t.

If you want to build:

Systems that scale
Teams that move fast
Products that survive years

Master the fundamentals.

Everything else is noise.