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”: “/”
}
]
}

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://

• http:///index.html

• http:///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:// (Pointing towards s3 index.html)

• http:///index.html (Pointing towards s3 index.html)

• http://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.

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