Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#1

Post by jonthepirate » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 3:39 PM UTC

Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3
coderwall.com

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#2

Post by svmegatron » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 3:59 PM UTC

This is a totally awesome idea. You are still in trouble if the load balancer has problems or S3 has problems (unlikely, but not impossible!). It's always smart to have a couple of ways of failing over to something if your main site has problems - for instance, I'm always surprised that more people don't spend time customizing the default rails error/maintenance pages for heroku.

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#3

Post by pquerna » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

svmegatron wrote: post #2

This is a totally awesome idea. You are still in trouble if the load balancer has problems or S3 has problems (unlikely, but not impossible!). It's always smart to have a couple of ways of failing over to something if your main site has problems - for instance, I'm always surprised that more people don't spend time customizing the default rails error/maintenance pages for heroku.

I previously wrote about making a downtime page:

http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2009/08/24/downtime-...

One thing you'll probably want to do is set 5xx HTTP status codes on your static site, and to try to get things to not cache it as much as possible.. A redirect to a subdomain hosted on s3 makes it more likely something like Google will pick up on it.

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#4

Post by frakkingcylons » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

Great idea. Putting the static site on Rackspace Cloud Files would also be advisable as an alternative to S3 in the event of an AWS outage.

EDIT: It also takes like no effort to turn on Akamai CDN option for Cloud Files as well.

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#5

Post by kmfrk » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:06 PM UTC

As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage, not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#6

Post by papsosouid » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:12 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #5

As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage , not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?

But that's wrong. You don't need anything else, S3 is for serving, and they deliberately added support and documentation for exactly this use case: hosting static websites.

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#7

Post by EGreg » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

Yeah but the big question is, how can you switch the DNS over in time when NONE of your servers can respond fast enough?

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#8

Post by mattzito » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:28 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #5

As someone said in the comments, just keep in mind that S3 is just for storage , not serving. You'll need something like CloudFront for that, although I don't know at which degree of activity it's going to save you money to use it. Maybe from the get-go?

S3 will cheerfully serve it -

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHostin...

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#9

Post by __lucas » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:29 PM UTC

You can do this now automatically with Route53 DNS failover http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns...

Re: Keep a static "emergency mode" site on S3

#10

Post by angersock » Fri, Jul 12, 2013, 4:31 PM UTC

Very good point--a static site up now can be waaaay better than a dynamic one that is slow and user-raging.

That said, looking through their linked startups is kind of depressing; the firstest of the first-world problems.

EDIT: Okay, okay, not all of them, as my salesbro points out.