Current Infrastructure

When I first decided to create this blog I was at a critical point in deciding what to host on-premises and what to host in the Cloud. As much as possible, I was trying to move workloads to the Cloud so that I didn’t have to worry about hardware failures and backups.

My previous experience in Content Management Systems defaulted to self-hosted WordPress installations. I have operated many WordPress sites over the years and although it is not perfect, it is relatively easy to add dynamic content and maintain (once you have set it up).

Upon migrating my blog to a Google Cloud Compute Engine VM (this very blog) I had a strange issue where it would freeze and become unresponsive. Only “Resetting” the VM would bring the blog back.

The findings were so interesting I thought I would share them.

Issue

It’s worth noting what the instance is (and importantly what resources it has been allocated) as it probably would not be an issue with a larger (and more expensive) instance. As of writing the instance is set to a “e2-micro” instance located in “us-central1”. The reason for this is you get one free instance in this region when using Google Cloud.