New Training: Design for Web-Scale Application Patterns

In this 6-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Bart Castle covers best practices for web-scale design. Learn how to apply a domain name to an Elastic Beanstalk application, how to move the static resources of a web application to an S3 bucket, and how to implement a CloudFront distribution. Gain an understanding of Route53, DNS redirection, blue/green deployments, and caching principles.

Learn AWS with one of these courses:

• AWS Technical Essentials

• AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

• AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate

• AWS Beginner Skills

• AWS Certified Developer – Associate

This training includes:

• 6 videos

• 35 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Designing for Web-Scale Architecture

• Managing DNS Domains with Route53

• Offload Static Assets to S3

• Managing Updates using Blue/Green Deployment

• Designing for Content Caching and Distribution

• Content Distribution with CloudFront

How AWS S3 Can Help Scale Your Website

Though AWS S3 is a powerful data storage tool, it can also be used to create highly available and scalable websites. You might not think of S3 as a tool to serve web content but depending on how your front-facing web products are created, it may be the perfect low-cost, low-maintenance tool. Let's discuss what benefits using S3 has.

There are two ways you can use S3 to help scale your website. First, utilize S3 to store static assets for your properties instead of storing them on your webserver. S3 can handle a lot of connections, and likewise, serves data fast. By removing static assets from your local server and storing them on S3, you eliminate the need for increasing storage as well as being able to serve content faster to your audience.

If your website isn't dynamic, you could use S3 itself as a web server. This eliminates the cost to build out a web server and maintain it. S3 can be a no-maintenance, lightning-fast web server solution.

Likewise, S3 buckets can be connected to Amazon's global CDN with a load balancer. That offers a cheap way for distributing out your web properties to CDN locations closer to your audience without complicated SSL or DNS solutions (by using AWS Route53 as well).

By using tools like React (to create a static website), and AWS Lambda (for providing backend APIs), you could deploy a completely serverless website for little cost and maintenance.