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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?
That's completely false. Hosting a static website on S3 is very well documented.
You can do this now automatically with Route53 DNS failover http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/dns...
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 may indeed serve it using Static Website Hosting (and you need to enable it anyway to use CloudFront with it).
Still, S3 is quite slow, and not globally distributed. It's indeed good advice and practice to use CloudFront in front of it.
CloudFront for a static website not very expensive either.
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I run my company's website runs off of S3 + CloudFront, and S3 alone is slow.
Load time is usually 2x to 3x when accessed via the S3 origin
Why not just do an origin-pull via CloudFront? No need to build a static site on S3.
Is this generally the experience of everyone here?
I'm actually working on something that'll make it incredibly fast to get a static site up and running with a powerful CDN and get form submissions working. Will be up at http://www.bitballoon.com soon.
A drop-in solution to achieve the same is using CloudFlare as CDN for your website. CloudFlare has a configurable "Always Online" mode that is automatically triggered whenever your site is down, that shows the user an offline version of the website, together with a warning message. Obviously, if you're using CloudFlare in the first place, chances are that you won't have too many problems with high peaks of traffic an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's completely false. Hosting a static website on S3 is very well documented.
yes but the recommended approach is to put CloudFront in front of it, if you care about performance at all
As __lucas has mentioned, this can be achieved with Route 53 Failover, which we'd recommend.
Route 53 Failover is (hopefully) pretty easy to configure. Just mark your ELB as the primary and enable target healthchecks, and add the S3 website bucket as the secondary. We'd also suggest that you use an S3 website bucket hosted in a different region than your ELB. This should take no more than a minute or two of setup in our console.
The difference is makes is that Route 53 failover doesn't depend on any "make this change" control plane ; the status of every Route 53 healthcheck is constantly being polled from at at least 16 locations and then sent (via 3 redundant networking paths) to every Route 53 DNS server. The system is always operating at full-load, with a tremendous degree of fault-tolerance and redundancy. We hope that makes it very robust against very "hard to fix" internet and power problems, and also API outages.
So for an awkward "worst case" example; if there were a large networking outage in an intermediate transit provider your customers might not be able to reach your ELB, and likewise you may not be able to reach the API to make the changes necessary. Route 53 failover should work anyway by detecting the reachability problem and flipping to the pre-configured secondary - an action which is triggered at our edge sites.
If you'd rather not use Route 53 as your primary DNS provider that's ok; all of the above can still be achieved by using a dedicated zone on Route 53 just for managing the failover, which you may then CNAME to, just as with ELB. Each zone costs $0.50/month. Of course we'd also like to make this kind of functionality easier to use and built-in, and that's something we're constantly working on.
> As far as I'm concerned, S3 static file website serving is completely indestructible. I only need one bland Apache server to bump requests over to it. Is this generally the experience of everyone here?