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No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

allthingsdistributed.com

21–30 of 39 posts

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#21
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…

[deleted]

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#22
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 your point is worth making.

The technology is good, but sometimes it's not about the technology.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#23
post #11
post #4

Coming from the CTO of Amazon...

Do you mean that in a "he's clearly just promoting S3" or a "woah, the CTO of Amazon has time to code neat tools" kind of way?

It doesn't sound like he coded all that much from the post. He even mentions that Cactus is a little bit too much work since there's not much of an existing community surrounding it. I was just surprised that it was the CTO of Amazon after I read the post.

S3 are kind of his "servers" no ;)

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean that in a "he's clearly just promoting S3" or a "woah, the CTO of Amazon has time to code neat tools" kind of way?

It doesn't sound like he coded all that much from the post. He even mentions that Cactus is a little bit too much work since there's not much of an existing community surrounding it. I was just surprised that it was the CTO of Amazon after I read the post. S3 are kind of his "servers" no ;)

Actually I did do some coding for the conversion, etc. :-) But I like it when doing something new to be able to look at how other people solved similar problems. And it is a bit early for Cactus in that respect, and Liquid feels much simpler than Django templates.

The extension and plugin mechanisms will make it easier for me to start adding my own code without having to modify the core framework. But it is always more fun to add these kind of things if there is a community to give you feedback.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#25
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.

S3 is less than $0.1 per GB per month. How big is your static pages before hitting the equivalent $5 cost?

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#26

If you want to get really exotic, you can check out the Haskell version of this tool. My site ( http://dave.fayr.am ) does the same thing using Hakyll and S3. You can see the code here: https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website

http://www.gwern.net is built on Hakyll as well; I'm currently hosting the static files on NFSN, but they're noticeably more expensive than Amazon S3 and I've been thinking of doing the same thing. What did you have to do to get S3 working?

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#27
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…

Are those really issues for a static site? (Heck, would any of your examples be a static site in the first place?) And if a static site is dumped by Amazon S3, is that really so bad? You're a rsync and a DNS edit away from the site being back up - that's the beauty of a static site, it's just files in directories.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#28
I started using a method really similar to this to host a blog a few months ago, shortly after the S3 static website feature was released. However, shortly after a post ended up on the front page of hacker news, requests to anything on the S3 bucket started responding with 503 errors.

Not entirely sure what the issue was, since I use S3 to host static assets for other sites that see similar traffic levels, and haven't gotten any 503 errors. And clearly ATD seems to be handling the HN traffic just fine.

Re: No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

#30

If you want to get really exotic, you can check out the Haskell version of this tool. My site ( http://dave.fayr.am ) does the same thing using Hakyll and S3. You can see the code here: https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website

I'm also using Hakyll for my site (http://www.wunki.org). Used Jekyll before, but I didn't think the markdown libraries were up to par with Pandoc. You can browse the source code of my site here: https://github.com/wunki/www.wunki.org.

I also threw together a script (./publish) that first gzips the static files and then uploads them to S3 with the correct headers (gzip and cache-control). Finally, it invalidates the old files on Cloudfront. Combined I get a very fast site, while keeping the cost low. Again, you can find it all in the github repository.

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