Gain Cost Savings by Provisioning and Hosting a Website in AWS Using Serverless Technology
Overview
Industry Data currently host all of their websites in AWS, utilising a serverless architecture to keep costs to a minimum and to ensure the sites can scale to any amount of unpredictable traffic.
Without dedicated internal website resource, it was imperative that the solution be 'set-and-forget' and would not require ongoing support or maintenance. Provisioning costly internal website servers was also not an option.
Since go-live there have been no issues reported on any of the websites being hosted by AWS, and aside from planned updates to content there has been no reason to access the solution for maintenance purposes.
Take a look around our site to see what functionality we have deployed.
Business Challenges
- Externally host a website for very little cost
- Ensure solution is quick to provision limiting the use of internal resource
- Automatically handle scaling, routing, accessibility, and storage
“Static websites deliver HTML, JavaScript, images, video and other files to your website visitors, and contain no application code. They are best for sites with few authors and relatively infrequent content changes, typically personal and simple marketing websites. Static websites are very low cost, provide high-levels of reliability, require almost no IT administration, and scale to handle enterprise-level traffic with no additional work.”
--aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/host-static-website
Project Outcomes
Industry Data coupled the standard AWS website hosting services with additional serverless components to achieve the following business outcomes:
- Solution elastically scales to manage all levels of traffic without any intervention
- Fast set-up and deployment meant website was up and running in days
- Fast load times for better user experience using CloudFront to cache content
- Durability of Amazon S3 means content does not have to be manually backed up to multiple locations
- Additional functionality built to allow reCAPTCHA validation on a Contact Us form to remove programmatic submissions
- Monthly hosting costs (S3, CloudFront & Route53) approximately $1.60 USD. AWS estimate a monthly hosting cost of $1-$3 pm
The Industry Data Solution
This website was originally hosted using just S3 and Route53 to manage DNS routing and content hosting. Amazon CloudFront was integrated to speed up content display for pages using templated html. A Contact Us form was integrated into the site using AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS to send an email to internal staff with the supplied information.
To mitigate the misuse of the Contact Us form, a further Lambda process was implemented to manage a reCAPTCHA validation process ensuring no programmatic completion of the form was possible. This reduced internal resource time which was being wasted on erroneous form submissions.
The AWS services utilised within this solution were: Amazon S3 / Amazon CloudFront / Amazon Route53 / Amazon API Gateway / AWS Lambda / Amazon SNS
The serverless architecture developed for this solution is documented below. For more information on website hosting in AWS please visit: AWS Web Hosting
