New Training: Hosting a Static Failover Website using Amazon S3 and Route53

In this 8-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Bart Castle covers Amazon S3 support for static website hosting. Gain an understanding of how to configure the bucket and object permissions, as well as a domain name and optional CloudFront CDN support. Learn how to use a S3 static website as a failover from a production website using Route53 healthcheck. Watch this new AWS training.

Watch the full course: Working with Amazon S3

This training includes:

• 8 videos

• 1 hour of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Primary and Secondary Site Failover

• Plan for Static Website failover

• Prepare EC2-hosted Primary Site

• Create Bucket and Upload Site Media

• S3 Public Website Permissions

• Configure HTTP Health Checks

• Configure Route53 Traffic Flow Policy

• Test the Failover Policy

AWS S3 is a Powerful Web Server Choice

AWS S3 is a great resource to store large amounts of data for a relatively cheap cost, but S3 can also serve other purposes. One of the many tricks up its sleeve is being able to host static websites as well.

What do we mean by a static website? A static website is a website that doesn't need server-side processing to render the website itself – generally simple HTML and often paired with javascript which is actual "run" on the browser of the end user. An example of a non-static website would be a web-property powered by WordPress (which requires PHP-processing on the server-side). Note that a static website does not mean that a website cannot still be dynamic. For instance, React-based websites can be both statically served and dynamic often through the use of client-side scripts.

Using AWS S3 to host websites is a great way to build a highly available, easy to maintain web presence. It won't have all of the features that using something like Apache or Nginx will, but it is much easier to configure and manage by allowing AWS to handle the actual web-server components for you..

S3 can also be combined with other AWS resources like CloudFront, Lambda, and API Gateway. In this way, a website can be built using serverless options. CloudFront is an easy-to-configure CDN that provides low-latency access for broadly-accessed sites.. Lambda and API Gateway are great resources for creating APIs that don't depend on a server. Using both options creates an infrastructure that is far more resilient than the traditional web server choices.