Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

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INTRO

Quiet cycle. Been enjoying summer and I've been doing a bit of consulting. Again, Ymir is quite stable now as a product, so I don't feel as much pressure to work myself to the bone on it.

That said, I'm happy that I wrapped up my pass at making improvements to CloudFront. This brings with it two new features. There's support for Origin Shield and Brotli compression. I'll talk about those in the product section.

Besides that, Ymir's new pricing came into effect last week. I think it'll probably slow down my sign ups. But I'm hoping it keeps my subscriber numbers stable at least.

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PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

As I said in the intro, this cycle was all improvements to CloudFront. Under the hood, I switched how CloudFront did caching and switched to using cache policies. This had the benefit of letting CloudFront compress responses with Brotli compression instead of gzip. (Well, once I disabled automatic gzip compression in the runtime. 😅)

This switch to cache policies also helped me improve the test coverage around CloudFront. CloudFront is the least tested part of the Ymir application due to how complex it is under the hood. So anything that helps improve test coverage makes me happy! (Ymir's test suite is one of my biggest pride and joy. It also lets me sleep like a baby. 👶)

The other CloudFront change is support for Origin Shield. Origin Shield is one of those AWS features where, when you read it, you think it's not useful to you. That's definitely what I thought about it when Marius brought it up in the forums.

But last year, I stumbled on this article comparing the performance of CloudFront and Cloudflare. (TL;DR they're as performant.) It's funny that they did the same thing as me and dismissed Origin Shield at first. But the key aspect is that, with Origin Shield, your origin traffic goes from going over AWS's network instead of the internet. This seems silly, but it made traffic to the origin 20-50% faster. 🤯

So if you're dealing with a lot of uncached traffic (like WooCommerce), consider maybe turning it on if you can afford it. This isn't a free feature, sadly. (For most regions, it's $0.0090 per 10,000 requests to the origin.)

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MARKETING

Still not doing great on the marketing front. This cycle I want to do a sample headless and serverless project to show off. 10up just came out with their headless WordPress project called headstart.

I'd like to have a sample GitHub repo with a headless WordPress site powered by headstart. The repo would have automatic deployments setup. Vercel for the frontend and Ymir for the backend. I think that'd be a cool thing to show off! 😃

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BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

I'm up to 39 subscribers! So close to 40, but I'm worried I'll be stuck at 39 indefinitely now with the pricing change. We'll see.

Partnerships still moving slowly. I had some good chats and I feel more confident about them. But as someone who does things publicly a lot. It's frustrating to not be able to talk about it still.

Carl