Chances are, when you typed in nigelaukland.com, you used the DNS servers provided by AWS Route 53. The domain is registered with the AWS Registrar and traffic is directed according to the Hosted Zone entries.
Rather than your browser obtaining this content from the host (in this case S3), the content is being delivered over CloudFront, the content delivery network (CDN) from AWS. So most likely this information is cached on an edge location, speeding delivery and reducing load on the host.
Given that I own the domain, I am supplied an SSL/TLS certificate to ensure secure encryption between client (your browser) and the host (the S3 bucket). This certificate is used by the CloudFront distribution for https-only communication with the S3 bucket.
The content distributed via CloudFront is stored on S3 and secured through Origin Access Control. This ensures that the S3 bucket remains private to everyone and everything except the CloudFront service.
Elastic Beanstalk can be used to manage and deploy web applications. It handles the infrastructure and networking allowing you to focus on aspects of the web application. Click to find out more 🙂
AWS CodeBuild can be used to build, test and prepare code for deployment. In this instance it's being used to take the static html files out of the distribution and write them to S3 for deployment.
I've used CodePipeline to trigger builds of this website. Once the Github reposity is updated the deployment pipeline is triggered. This includes build and test phases before deploying to the website S3 bucket. All in less than 60 seconds.
AWS provides different mechanisms to manage the registry, deployment and running of containerised applications. Click here to find out more.
AWS Lambda is a "serverless" compute service that allows me to run applications in a scalable manner without having to think about the provision of associated infrastructure. It integrates well with many other AWS services.
API Gateway provides serverless API management capability, taking away the need to manage routes through code and providing administration of environemnts, stages and deployments. Click through to examine a simple demo of an API deployed across three environments.
