Project: This webpage

As stated above, this page itself serves as my first home-grown cloud project! The first hurdle was, of course, creating my webpage. Given that this is a simple static web page, I decided to hand-code and style all of the contents. This allowed me to fully customize and control the contents displayed, without needing to concern myself with learning a new web design framework.

The more important part of the project was to actually deploy the site on AWS. To start, I first used Route 53 to register my desired domain name. Once I had my domain, I created the required certificates and records. This allowed me to both redirect from any subdomains (such as www.josephdoriojr.com) to my root domain (josephdoriojr.com). It also allowed me to more easily configure any connection to my site to use HTTPS, rather than simply HTTP.

I then created a Standard S3 bucket to store my files. I had originally considered using S3 static website hosting to serve the files, but given the complexity for subdomain redirects and HTTPS usage through that method, I instead opted for a Cloudfront distribution (using only the North America/Europe locations to save on costs) and updated the S3 bucket policy to allow the proper Cloudfront access. This also allowed me to keep the contents of my bucket as private as an extra layer of security, rather than leaving all contents to be directly publicly accessible.

And that pretty much sums this project up! This is a fairly simple project and does not have many parts, but it serves as an excellent "Hello world!"-type exercise for working with AWS and provides an excellent platform for me to demonstrate my further projects. Thank you for reading and feel free to either check out my other projects or to reach out using my contact info below!