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No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

allthingsdistributed.com

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Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#13

Post by mapgrep »

While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile.

You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted nor even charged with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman.

This could be an issue for reasons like...

-You make a Web app that Hollywood deems to somehow encourage or abet piracy

-You provide a service used by a customer deemed to be politically controversial

-You facilitate financial transactions deemed to be potential helpful to "terrorists" or the wrong sort of activists (e.g. Wikileaks).

Werner, since you submitted this entry from your personal blog, maybe you could clarify what safeguards Amazon has put in place to prevent a repeat of the Wikileaks situation. Many companies will stand behind a customer barring a court order, but for Amazon this clearly is not the case. How do you decide when to abandon a customer?

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#16

Post by chbrown »

If you go to the bottom of the page at http://allthingsdistributed.com/, you'll see that the blog actually requires "Movable Type Pro".

AWS doesn't provide a way to serve from S3 without the help of a CNAME redirect, which means that you're out of luck if you want to use the Jekyll+S3 setup with a naked domain name (naked, as in no "www" or "blog" subdomain). And it also means that you're going to have to get some other server (Google Apps can do it), to redirect your *.domain.com queries to www.domain.com. And then your users' DNS is running all over the place, incurring, in my opinion, unneeded delay.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#17

Post by anthonyb »

chbrown wrote: post #16

If you go to the bottom of the page at http://allthingsdistributed.com/ , you'll see that the blog actually requires "Movable Type Pro". AWS doesn't provide a way to serve from S3 without the help of a CNAME redirect, which means that you're out of luck if you want to use the Jekyll+S3 setup with a naked domain name (naked, as in no "www" or "blog" subdomain). And it also means that you're going to have to get some o…

Do you even really need S3 if you're just serving up static pages?

A $5/mo web host or a VPS slice would probably be overkill - you're not hitting a database at all.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#18

Post by werner »

chbrown wrote: post #16

If you go to the bottom of the page at http://allthingsdistributed.com/ , you'll see that the blog actually requires "Movable Type Pro". AWS doesn't provide a way to serve from S3 without the help of a CNAME redirect, which means that you're out of luck if you want to use the Jekyll+S3 setup with a naked domain name (naked, as in no "www" or "blog" subdomain). And it also means that you're going to have to get some o…

Actually that was my fault. I had just switched off the redirect of allthingsdistributed.com to www.allthingsdistributed.com and as such you ended up at the old MT installation. That is now corrected.

You are correct; to map to an S3 bucket you need a CNAME. But DNS doesn't allow the apex to be a CNAME so you will need to redirect that. Route53 solves that for EC2 with the help of ELB. But there is no such solution for S3 (yet).

I am using the www subdomain as much as possible, so the redirect only happens if a visitor actually types in the apex name, in all other cases they will get where they need to be directly. But I agree that it would be better to solve this at a different level.

Launch and then iterate...

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#19

Post by Volpe »

mapgrep wrote: post #13

While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile. You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted nor even charged with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman. This could be an issu…

I think you nailed the TINY niche of things that amazon could take issue with and pull your site down. So now back to 99.9999999% of content producers on the internet: S3 is "extremely durable"

I've heard of other (large) providers pulling sites that contained "objectionable" content down. Wikileaks just had the media's attention at the time.

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