Landing Page With Amazon S3, CloudFront, AWS Certificate Manager
Last week, I created a simple landing page for a business solely utilising AWS services. I want to share that experience in this post.
The landing page is a single page view detailing what the business does, with a CTA embedded on the same page. Simple enough, I bootstrapped the site using Hugo, prepared a theme, and positioned the content accordingly on the page. It took only a few minutes to get it up.
Deployment is the part that I want to experiment with more. I have wanted to run a static site entirely using AWS services, and this is just the right time that I get to work on this.
Skimming the details, the action items are:
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Create an S3 bucket. Just a bucket, without website hosting feature, enabled.
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Create an IAM user with the necessary permission to deploy Hugo sites into the bucket.
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Create a certificate on AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for a custom domain. Of course, this means you need to register the domain name via a registrar or Amazon Route 53, which is slightly pricier compared to standard market rates.
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Create a CloudFront distribution, specifying the S3 bucket as the origin and the custom domain to use as the alias. Attach the ACM certificate to the distribution.
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On your domain service provider, add a CNAME record for the custom domain, pointing to the CloudFront distribution’s domain name.
The S3 bucket does not need to be publicly exposed. With CloudFront Origin Access Identity (OAI), you only need to allow the OAI to read the contents in the bucket since CloudFront is serving as the public interface for the S3 bucket.
The site’s traffic is not as high right now. With AWS Free Tier offering on this new AWS account, the operational cost per month for this setup is close to zero. So far, the only costs involved are:
- Annual fee for renewing the custom domain.
- Monthly charges for the one and only administrator user on the business’s G Suite account.
But for sure, the cost will scale up slowly as the site’s traffic picks up.
It is an exciting experience to explore building an entire website solely using AWS services. I enjoy scouring through AWS documentation on S3, CloudFront, and ACM, understanding best practices and properly setting up least-privileged access in utilising those services.