Ref: https://learn.cantrill.io/courses/1820301/lectures/41301470

DEMO: https://learn.cantrill.io/courses/1820301/lectures/41301471

• Summary
• Contents:

S3 Static HTTP Website Hosting (S3 Bucket as Static Website)

• Normal access to S3 objects is via APIs → secure & flexible
  • 💡 CLI & AWS Management Console UI use APIs behind the scenes
• 🔧 S3 Static Website Hosting: allows access to S3 objects via HTTP
  • The S3 bucket can become a static website
  • Useful for e.g. blogs, portfolio websites…
• 👍 Quite simple to set up and use:
  1. Enable the feature in the S3 bucket and set Index & Error documents (HTML documents)
     • Index page → default page, returned when requesting the website and not something specific (entry point to most websites)
     • Error page → used when something goes wrong (e.g. HTTP 404)
  2. Website endpoint created → can access the S3 bucket via HTTP via given IP address
     • Default endpoint/address comes predefined by AWS
       • For custom endpoint/address, you need to pay for your DNS domain
     • ‼️ If accessing endpoint via browser, must first disable “Block Public Access” settings in the bucket!!
     • ‼️ Without Amazon CloudFront, you can only access the S3 bucket via HTTP, not HTTPS!
       • 💡 We will expose the static website via CloudFront in a later section, and enable HTTPS
  3. Custom Domain Endpoint via Amazon Route 53 → Example:
     1. Purchase domain example.org in R53
     2. Create bucket and name it example.org
        • ‼️ Bucket name matters!
     3. Create a DNS resource in R53 to route to the S3 bucket
     • 💡 This will also be part of the demo in the CloudFront section of the course

S3 Static Website Hosting - Use Cases

Diagram: https://github.com/acantril/aws-sa-associate-saac03/blob/main/0700-SIMPLE_STORAGE_SERVICE(S3)/00_LEARNINGAIDS/S3StaticHosting-1.png

1. Offloading: offload heavy media from compute services into S3
   • S3 is designed for storage of large data at scale
   • S3 storage is much cheaper than storage in a compute service
   • Example: move photos from EC2 instance into S3, make photos available via HTTP, have EC2 instance return HTTP address of a photo when queried by client
2. Out-of-band pages: easy place to host a static failover page when main service is down
   • Good practice to serve these pages from a different service (if your EC2 server is down, it could be possible all of EC2 is down → serving from S3 will be )
   • Example: you host your main website from an EC2 instance. If server is down (e.g. due to maintenance), configure DNS to failover to an error/status static page in S3
3. Simple static websites: blogs, portfolio websites…

S3 Billing

• ❗ S3 is INCREDIBLY cheap, even outside the Free Tier!
  • Extremely popular storage service (was designed for this)
• S3 charges for:
  1. Storage
     • More details in S3 Object Storage Classes
  2. Data transfer OUT of S3 (relevant for API and HTTP requests)
     • ❗ Transferring data INTO S3 is FREE!
• Currently, 12-month Free Tier offers:
  • Up to 5GB of standard storage
  • Up to 20 000 GET requests per month
  • Up to 2000 PUT requests per month
  • 💡 And even when you go above the Free Tier, S3 is usually cheap and worth it! But always be aware of your costs!
• Always check documentation for up-to-date information: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/