AWS CloudFront for High Availability
AWS Cloud Hands-on Lab Practice Series
Project Overview —
This project revolves around AWS CloudFront where we configure an distribution, origin groups for a website to be highly available, accessible globally to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. By leveraging AWS S3 static website hosting we configure our bucket as a static website, along with it we deploy one more website on AWS EC2 which can act as failover/redundant website target.
SOLUTIONS ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW -
First Let’s understand the real world use case :
- E-commerce Product Images and Static Assets: An e-commerce platform wants to optimize the delivery of product images, style sheets, and other static assets to enhance the online shopping experience for users.
- Use Case: AWS CloudFront can be utilized to cache and deliver these static assets from edge locations, ensuring faster page loads and a more responsive user interface.
- Accelerated Gaming Content Delivery: Online gaming platforms want to deliver game updates, patches, and in-game assets with low latency for a seamless gaming experience.
- Use Case: AWS CloudFront accelerates the delivery of gaming content by caching frequently accessed assets at edge locations. This minimizes download times for users and enhances the overall gaming experience.
- High-Traffic Event Websites: Event organizers are expecting a high volume of traffic for a specific event website, such as ticket sales or live streaming of an event.
- Use Case: AWS CloudFront helps handle the surge in traffic by distributing content across multiple edge locations, ensuring that users experience minimal latency and preventing the origin server from being overwhelmed.
Prerequisite —
- AWS Account with Admin privileges
AWS Services Usage —
- AWS CloudFront
- AWS S3
- AWS EC2
- AWS VPC
- AWS IAM
STEP BY STEP GUIDE -
STEP 1 : Creating AWS S3 bucket through console.
- Login to AWS account, Navigate to AWS S3 Service.
- Click on create bucket
- Provide Unique Bucket Name (It will be website name)
- Select the AWS Region according to nearest user location.
- Uncheck the Block all public access.
- Tick Mark — I acknowledge that the current settings might result in this bucket and the objects within becoming public.
- Keep rest of the settings as is & hit Create bucket.
STEP 2 : Creating AWS S3 bucket policy through console.
- Navigate to permissions tab of newly created s3 bucket.
- Copy, edit & paste it in the policy section
- Edit the bucket ARN & validate the json formatting & save it.
- This policy allow anyone to make GET request from Internet.
{
“Version”: “2012–10–17”,
“Statement”: [
{
“Effect”: “Allow”,
“Principal”: “*”,
“Action”: “s3:GetObject”,
“Resource”: “<s3-bucket-arn>/*”
}
]
}
STEP 3 : Enable Static website hosting
- Navigate to properties tab on your bucket.
- Scroll till down to enable static website hosting.
- select Host a static website
- index document → index.html -> save
- You will get a FQDN which is accessible over internet to serve the content.
STEP 4 : Create index.html & upload it.
- Create a file named index.html in notepad, Copy the content from GitHub.
- You can update the content of index.html as per your choice.
- Upload the index.html on s3 bucket.
- Your website is up & ready to be shared !! Congrats…
STEP 5 : Launch an EC2 Instance with User Script:
- Navigate to EC2 & hit the Launch Instance in the region of your choice.
- Enter Name -> Select OS -> Select EC2 Type (t2.micro) -> no key pair.
- For Network select default VPC -> Enable Auto Assign Public IP.
- Create New Security Group with Inbound access of HTTP & HTTPS.
- In ADVANCE SETTING scroll down till last & copy/upload the userscript_for_ec2 from this GitHub Repo.
- Hit the Launch Instance & wait for its status to running.
- Enter the PUBLIC IPv4 / EC2 PUBLIC DNS in the browser.
- http://<Public_IP>
- http://<Public_IP>/index.html
- http://<Public_IP>/index2.html
- You can notice we have deployed 2 index pages & are serving as expected from AWS EC2 Instance.
STEP 6 : Create CloudFront Distribution:
- Navigate to CloudFront Service on AWS Console.
- Select the Origin -> S3 Bucket Endpoint (Bucket created in step 1)
- Protocol -> HTTP Only
- Keep rest of the settings as default & hit the create distribution.
- Once the CloudFront distribution is deployed.
- Visit the CloudFront distribution Domain Name from Browser.
- You will be redirected to S3 static website.
STEP 7 : Add EC2 as Origin in CDN Distribution:
- Navigate to Origin Tab of CloudFront Service on AWS Console.
- Create Origin -> Enter EC2 PUBLIC DNS as Origin Domain.
- NOTE : ONLY EC2 PUBLIC DNS WILL WORK NOT PUBLIC IP.
- Protocol -> HTTP Only
- Keep rest of the settings as default & hit the create Origin.
STEP 8 : Create Origin Groups of S3 & EC2:
- Navigate to Origin Tab of CloudFront Service on AWS Console.
- Create Origin Group
- Choose Origins -> 1st s3 Origin & 2nd EC2 Origin.
- Enter Name for Origin Group of your choice.
- Select all Failover Criteria.
- Finally, Create Origin Group.
- IMP: This is for origin failover for scenarios that require high availability. We created an origin group with two origins, a primary(S3) and a secondary(EC2). If the primary origin is unavailable, or returns specific HTTP response status codes that indicate a failure, CloudFront automatically switches to the secondary origin.
STEP 9 : Change Behavior of CDN :
- Navigate to Behavior's Tab of CloudFront Service on AWS Console.
- Select the one listed & hit the edit button.
- Now change the Origin to Origin Group (created in step 8)
- Save it & lets play around with CloudFront.
STEP 10 : Lets play with CloudFront :
- Now hit the below URLs to understand the working of distribution.
- http://<cloudfront_distribution_domain_name> (Pointing towards s3 index.html)
- http://<cloudfront_distribution_domain_name>/index.html (Pointing towards s3 index.html)
- http://<cloudfront_distribution_domain_name>index2.html (Pointing towards EC2 index.html)
- Lets Do a FAILOVER →
- Remove index.html from s3 bucket.
- After a while it will point it towards EC2 index.html
- This concludes our lab, which shows how CloudFront Distribution works along with origins & origin groups to achieve High Availability, speed & secure content delivery.
STEP 10 : Decommission :
- Terminate the EC2 Instance.
- Disable & Delete the CloudFront Distribution.
- Permanently delete the S3 object & S3 buckets.
Congrats ! We have successfully completed lab for AWS CloudFront for High Availability.
I am Kunal Shah, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, helping clients to achieve optimal solutions on the Cloud. Cloud Enabler by choice, DevOps Practitioner having 8+ Years of overall experience in the IT industry.
I love to talk about Cloud Technology, DevOps, Digital Transformation, Analytics, Infrastructure, Dev Tools, Operational efficiency, Serverless, Cost Optimization, Cloud Networking & Security.
#aws #community #builders #devops #cloudfront #cdn #s3 #ec2 #content #delivery #network #solution #management #centralize #quick #secure #speed #performance #edge #locations #operations #infrastructure #scalable #reliable #highly #available #design #acloudguy
You can reach out to me @ acloudguy.in
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