| Next » | |
   | Did this page help you? Yes | No | Tell us about it... |
Overview
Suppose you want to build a website to offer static content such as product catalogs, images, and manuals to your customers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reliable, secure, scalable, and high-performance infrastructure upon which to store and host your website. It's easy to get started, and you can use the AWS Management Console to set up everything you need to host a static website.
This guide walks through the process of using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront to host and deploy your website. It also gives you a variation, which uses Amazon Route 53, that you can use to provide secure and reliable routing. We’ll review an example architecture of a static website hosted on AWS, and we’ll walk through the process of deploying the website by using several key AWS services and following best practices. You can adapt this sample to your specific needs if you want. By the end of this walkthrough, you should be able to do the following:
Sign up for AWS.
Create a location to store static files for your website.
Create a content delivery network.
Clean up your AWS resources.
If this guide is not exactly what you are looking for, you may want to check out the following documents:
About AWS - Provides information about AWS, with helpful links for leaning more.
Getting Started Guide: AWS Free Usage Tier - Provides information about how to get started with the free usage tier.
Getting Started Guide: AWS Computing Basics for Linux - Introduces you to several key AWS services and components—what these services are, why they are important, and how to use them. It also provides a simple example architecture on a Linux platform and walks you through a deployment that uses this architecture.
Getting Started Guide: AWS Computing Basics for Windows - Introduces you to several key AWS services and components—what these services are, why they are important, and how to use them. It also provides a simple example architecture on a Windows platform and walks you through a deployment that uses this architecture.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Getting Started Guide - Provides information that helps you get started using Amazon EC2 instances.
How Does AWS Help?
If you are responsible for creating and deploying a static website, you'll face infrastructure challenges. Where will you store your files? How will you deliver your content? How will you ensure reliability and high performance for your website? To solve these challenges, AWS provides Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront for easy, seamless, and cost-effective solutions.
Using Amazon S3, you can host your website files on the same fast, reliable, and secure infrastructure Amazon uses to run its global network of websites. Amazon S3 provides a highly durable and available store for a variety of content, ranging from your website's HTML files to media files. It allows you to offload your entire storage infrastructure onto the cloud, where you can take advantage of Amazon S3’s scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing to handle your storage needs.
Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give you an easy way to distribute content to your website users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments. Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your files are automatically routed to the edge location with the lowest latency, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service.
It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost
effective way to route end users to websites by translating human readable names
like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1
that computers use to connect to each other.
The following table gives a brief overview of the Amazon services used in this Getting Started Guide.
| Challenges | Amazon Web Services | Benefits |
|---|---|---|
|
Need a low-cost, reliable online storage web service to host static website content. |
Amazon Simple Storage Service |
Amazon Simple Storage service offers a low cost, highly reliable solution for hosting static website content. |
|
Need a content delivery network (CDN) to provide low-latency, high data transfer speeds so end users don't experience unnecessary delays. |
Amazon CloudFront |
Amazon CloudFront speeds up the loading of streaming or downloaded static content by caching the content via a local edge cache at a location with the lowest latency. |
|
Developers and businesses need a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to Internet websites. |
Amazon Route 53 |
Amazon Route 53 allows users to access Internet websites by routing human-readable domain names to numeric IP addresses. |
Static Website Hosting Architecture
The following diagram illustrates an example architecture of a static website using Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53.
Amazon S3 provides secure and cost-efficient storage for your static website files. Amazon CloudFront caches high volume content, allowing global customers to rapidly access your website. Amazon Route 53 connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS. For a step-by-step walkthrough of how to build out this architecture, see Getting Started . This walkthrough will teach you how to do the following:
Sign up for AWS.
Create an Amazon S3 bucket and store files in the bucket.
Create a CloudFront distribution.
Clean up your AWS resources.
For more information on how to use Amazon Route 53 in this architecture, see Amazon Route 53 .
