aws-static-site-with-cd

🚀 Automatically deploy static websites to AWS using a deploy agent

Cheap, secure and fully automated solution to handle your static website deployment to AWS.
Using step-by-step guide in minutes you can:
- create infrastructure for a static website
- automate deployments from scratch.

Why

This setup has different goals that makes difference from other static website setups:

🛡️ Security first: Least-privilege principle applied using paranoid granularity. See architecture | security.
🤖 Automate everything: Enables continuous delivery & integration using a deploy agent. Maintenance-free, scales forever. See reference pipeline.
💰 Cost-optimized: Components are pre-configured to optimise costs, for more strategies see cost optimizations. - I personally host a few sites using this solution and pay around 0.3$ per site.
⚙️ Ready-to-configurations for static website requirements

Step-by-step guide

❗ Prerequisite: A registered domain name for website, can be Route53 or somewhere else.

Manual deployment

❗ Not recommended. You can skip directly to automated deployment

Deploy infrastructure
1. Deploy dns-stack.yaml.
2. Configure custom domain registrar
3. Deploy certificate-stack.yaml
  - Must be in us-east-1 see certificate stack
  - Watch the status here
4. Deploy web-stack.yaml
Deploy application
- Copy your site to S3 and invalidate CloudFront cache
- 💡 You can call scripts to do that.

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Setting up automatic deployments

Estimated time: ☕ 10 min

Deploy IAM stack
Run your first build pipeline
Configure your domain registrar

Deploy IAM stack

For the first time, you'll deploy IAM stack by a user you already own.
- After initial deployment, you'll no longer need to use another user.
- The stack will give you a deploy user and different roles it can claim.
It'll give permissions to deploy the rest of the stack to the user.

Deploy IAM stack using console

Go to Cloud Formation home
Click on "Create stack"
Select "Upload a template file"
Upload iam-stack.yaml
Choose a name for your stack, see choosing a name

Choosing a name

Here you'll choose the name for your stack(s)
💡 Recommended: Have a prefix for each stack e.g. websitename-iam-stack, websitename-cert-stack...
❗ Double check to ensure you have max 18 chars ¹ (28 without iam-stack- prefix) in your stack name.
- Otherwise AWS trims the name, and it breaks some policies that gives permissions by the stack name, see security
Update also names for future stacks in Parameters.

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Run your first build pipeline

Configure your deploy agent
Run the deployment

Configure your deploy agent

Add the secrets
Create your build pipeline
Run the deployment

Add the secrets

Add IAM secret ID + key, using console:
1. Go to IAM users
2. Find and click on user generated by IAM stack, should have name as {stackName}-DeploymentUser-{id}
3. Go to "Security credentials" then click on "Create access key" for the user.
4. Copy "Access Key ID" and save it as AWS_DEPLOYMENT_USER_ACCESS_KEY_ID secret
5. Reveal and copy "Secret access key" and save it as AWS_DEPLOYMENT_USER_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY secret
Add more secrets from from Outputs section of previous iam-stack stack, using console:
1. Go to Cloud Formation home
2. Click on deployed IAM stack name
3. Go to "Output" tab, and copy each value to secret name given in "Description" field

Create your build pipeline

If you use GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines, you can use the predefined template here. Otherwise, configure the steps given there in your build agent. It simply calls bash scripts in scripts as would be pretty easy to port anywhere. Feel free to contribute your solution as pull request to pipelines folder.
Using the predefined template ↘
It deploys changes on each push to master. You might not want that, you can change the behavior in first lines.
In predefined template, you'll see TODO: comments stating where you should customize the steps. Update those! See reference for a node application privacy.sexy here.

Run the deployment

If you use Route53 as your domain registrar, you've completed setting up the deployments!
❗ Configure your domain registrar.
Web stack may fail after DNS stack because you need to validate your domain.
- Once validated, delete the failed stack in CloudFormation & re-run your deployment pipeline.
💡 You can watch certificate status on ACM after configuring your registrar.

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Configure your domain registrar

If your domain registrar is not registered in Route 53
- 🚶 Go to your domain registrar and change name servers to NS values
  - dns-stack.yaml outputs those in CloudFormation stack that can be found in Cloud Formation home
  - Or you can find those in Route53
When nameservers of your domain updated, the certification will get validated automatically,
If your domain registrar is already Route 53
- Then the nameservers the certification will get validated automatically.
- When you register a domain with Route 53, a hosted zone is already assigned and domain registration is updated to use those name servers.
- However the stacks create a new hosted zone that it will manage.
  - So you'll manually update your NS values again through Route53 -> Domains -> Registered domains -> Your domain
🎉🥳 Your site should be deployed and ready now!
❗ To use e-mail for your domain you should add your MX records by extending web template

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Architecture

AWS serverless architecture automatically provisioned using CloudFormation files and deployment scripts.
Keeping highest security & automation and lowest AWS costs were the highest priorities of the design.

Building blocks

S3
- Hosts the content.
- The content is only revealed to CloudFront to reduce the bills & increase security
CloudFront
- Provides SSL/TLS layer in front of S3 as S3 static websites do not support it.
  - It also offers integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall.
- Caches S3 content using CloudFront Origin Access Identity.
- Publicly accessible.
- (Optional) uses Lambda@Edge for implementing default directory indexes
Certificate Manager
- Holds certification to be used with TLS communication
- Uses a lambda for automating deployment of certificates, see certificate-stack.
Route53
- Allows you to use custom domain.

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Automation

The flow is basically: Deploy infrastructure ► Deploy web application ► Invalidate CloudFront Cache
To see how to build a deployment pipeline check github.yaml
- It's a basic reference to show how to call different scripts to automate CloudFormation & web application deployment on any server & automation tool.
- It uses GitOps approach where everything that's merged in the master goes directly to production.
Check out step-by-step guide to get started.

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Cost optimizations

S3
- Website uses cheapest S3 class level (ONEZONE_IA).
  - Lower availability as it only exists in single available zone.
- It may not be the cheapest option if you update your content too frequently as you pay for 30 days of data storage for any data that you put there.
- 💡 If you update your content frequently, or want high availability, consider upgrading to STANDARD.
CloudFront
- The website uses cheapest CloudFront distribution.
  - If you have too much traffic it may be beneficial to increase the cache locations.
    - See web-stack
- The deployment script invalidates CloudFront cache on every deploy.
  - It ensures that your site will serve the latest files.
  - Invalidation requests for first 1000 files each month are free, it costs $0.005 for invalidating each additional file.
  - Validating on each deploy would work perfectly with low to nothing costs for most of the cases.
  - 💡 You may want to change your cache strategy if you deploy more than 100 - 1000 a day, or deploy more than hundreds of files every day.
- Lambda@Edge
  - Optionally deployed only if you need the functionality.
  - Uses the lowest memory settings as it does not need any memory
  - It timeouts in 3 seconds which should never be reached anyway

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Security

Infrastructure security

S3 is not publicly available.
- Have a very strict CORS policy that only allows the website itself, see CORS
Only CloudFront can read it using CloudFront Origin Access Identity.
- CloudFront can only s3:GetObject
  - It's essential for it to be able to read any webpage.
- s3:ListBucket is required for right 404 status code, otherwise S3 returns 403.
  - However we don't need to give s3:ListBucket to CloudFront as we just host a static website, we can assume 403 as 404 for functionalities such as deep links and default 404 page.
CloudFront redirects HTTP to HTTP(s), enforcing secure connection.
CloudFront uses TLS v1.2 as SSL/TLS protocol. You can choose to change to weaker (TLS v1.1) if you want to support legacy clients but offer less security. Never go lower than TLS 1.1

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Deployment security

Single deploy user claims different role per deploy step, iam-stack sets the limits and gives least permissions to the each role.
All stacks use prefix-based role & access management based on the name of the stack.
Any information about the account that's not known in CloudFormation is regarded as sensitive and are masked.

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DevSecOps

Any pull request or push to this repository is automatically linted for potential errors and also scanned for vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability scans runs also periodically each month to check against latest known vulnerabilities.

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CloudFormation

AWS infrastructure is defined as code in four different layers
Cross stacks pattern is chosen instead of single stack or nested stacks because:
- Easier to test & maintain & smaller files and different lifecycles for different areas.
- It allows to deploy web bucket in different region than others as other stacks are global (us-east-1) resources.
All stacks will tag their resources using RootDomainName parameter.

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iam-stack

Creates & updates the deployment user.
Each deployment step has its own temporary credentials with own permissions.
Everything in IAM layer is fine-grained using least privileges principle.

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certificate-stack

It'll generate SSL certification for the root domain and www subdomain.
❗ It must be deployed in us-east-1 to be able to be used by CloudFront by web-stack.
It uses CustomResource and a lambda instead of native AWS::CertificateManager::Certificate because:
- Problem:
  - AWS variant waits until a certificate is validated.
  - There's no way to automate validation without workaround.
- Solution:
  - Deploy a lambda that deploys the certificate (so we don't wait until certificate is validated)
  - Get DNS records to be used in validation & export it to be used later.

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dns-stack

It'll deploy Route53 hosted zone
Each time Route53 hosted zone is re-created it's required to update the DNS records in the domain registrar.
- See Configure your domain registrar
This stack does the most minimal job, it's isolated to minimize updates & possible failures with it.
- Hopefully you'll never need to recreate this stack.
- As each update requires you to wait for DNS propogation of the domain.

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web-stack

❗ Prerequisite: configure your domain registrar
It'll deploy S3 bucket and CloudFront in front of it.
It'll register:
- IPv4 A records for root domain and www subdomain
- IPv6 AAAA records for root domain and www subdomain.
- It's defaulted to cheapest PriceClass_100, for other allowed values check AWS documentation.
Parameters:
- UseIndexHtmlRewriteLambda
  - Allowed Values : true, false
  - Default Value : true
  - Description : Enables default directory indexing
- UseDeepLinks
  - Allowed Values : true, false
  - Default Value : false
  - Description : Useful for Single Page Applications with own router, e.g. Angular, Vue, React
    - ❗ Does not work with 404Page
- 404Page
  - Allowed Values : path to file, e.g. ./404.html
  - Default Value : -
  - Description : Tells CloudFront which page to return when the object in S3 does not exist.
    - ❗ Does not work with UseDeepLinks
- CloudFrontPriceClass
  - Allowed Values : PriceClass_100, PriceClass_200, PriceClass_All
  - Default Value : PriceClass_100
  - Description : Overwrite CloudFront distribution price class.
    - See also cost optimizations
- MinimumProtocolVersion
  - Allowed Values : TLSv1, TLSv1.1_2016, TLSv1_2016, TLSv1.2_2018
  - Default Value : TLSv1.2_2018
  - Description : TLSv1.2_2018 is recommended for the highest security.
    - You can use lower version if your viewers are using browsers or devices that don’t support TLSv1.2.
    - See also infrastructure security

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Default directory indexes

Problem
- CloudFront can redirect test.com to test.com/index.html
  - 4 it does not work on subfolders e.g. test.com/hello/ to test.com/hello/index.html
- AWS static websites can redirect test.com/folder/ to test.com/folder.html
  - However it does not work with HTTPS, and only support HTTP.
  - We don't want bucket to be publicly accessible, and HTTP does not work with CloudFront Origin Access Identity
  - Instead we must use AWS REST endpoint to be able to use CloudFront Origin Access Identity.
    - But it does not support redirection to a default index page.
- So user must enter test.com/folder/index.html because test.com/folder/ won't work!
Solution
- Deploy Lambda@Edge that'll run where the edge CloudFront node runs to serve S3 content.
  - It redirects requests without '/' to links with trailing '/'
    - e.g. test.com/folder to test.com/folder/
  - It creates new URL by replacing any '/' that occurs at the end of a URI with index.html.
    - e.g. test.com/folder to test.com/folder/index.html.
- 💰 It's almost free. AWS Pricing:
  - $0.60 per 1 million requests ($0.0000006 per request)
  - $0.00000625125 for every 128MB-second
  - So its around ≈ $0,00000685125 per request which makes ≈ 0,68 USD per 100.000 request
  - And the function executes only when CloudFront forwards a new request to S3 bucket
    - If the requested object is in the edge cache, the function doesn't execute.

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CORS

When you import modules such as :

<script src="/exporter.js" type="module" ></script>
<script type="module">
import * as imported from "./exporter.js";
</script>

It'll make a CORS request to function. So S3 only allows the website itself to do CORS requests to ensure maximum security.

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Deployment scripts

❗ Prerequisite: AWS CLI v2
Scripts:
- configure/create-user-profile.sh: Creates AWS profile for the build user.
- deploy/deploy-stack.sh: validates & deploys given CloudFormation stack.
- deploy/deploy-to-s3.sh: Synchronizes given folder with the given S3 bucket using given storage class.
- deploy/invalidate-cloudfront-cache.sh: Invalidates cache on root level so the site is up again.
Best way to see their usage in a build pipeline is checking out the reference pipeline.

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Signing sessions

Using --session parameter you can sign each role claim with useful information for auditing through e.g. CloudTrail.
- It gives helpful insight for why a role is claimed during deploy.
Example using GitHub pre-defined variables: --session ${{github.actor}}-${{github.event_name}}-${{github.sha}}

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Extending

You can always copy the stacks and modify, however then you miss the updates. There's one more way to extend to templates and always keeping up-to-date easily:

Name your stack as such: yourexistingwebstackname-extend
- You must start with existing stack name as it'll then be granted permissions by IAM-stack.
- You must then add -extend suffix as it's the only suffix allowed in IAM-stack.
Write your logic, feel free to use exported variables from other stacks
Deploy using the same role that deploys the extended stack
- E.g. if you are extending web-stack you then use AWS_WEB_STACK_DEPLOYMENT_ROLE_ARN secret to claim the role.

❗ It's only WEB stack that's allowed to extend right now. Please create an issue if you'd like to extend other stacks as well.

Extending records to use e-mail

Create a yaml file like dns-records.yaml

Add the DNS records:

  AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'

  Description: Extend DNS records with e-mail to be able to receive emails

  Parameters:
    DnsStackName:
      Type: String
      Description: Name of the DNS stack.
    RootDomainName:
      Type: String
      Description: The root DNS name of the website e.g. cloudarchitecture.io
      AllowedPattern: (?!-)[a-zA-Z0-9-.]{1,63}(?<!-)
      ConstraintDescription: Must be a valid root domain name

  Resources:
    EmailDNSRecords:
      Type: AWS::Route53::RecordSet
      Properties: 
        Comment: "MX records for Gandi to recieve e-mails"
        HostedZoneId:
          Fn::ImportValue: !Join [':', [!Ref DnsStackName, DNSHostedZoneId]]
        Name: !Ref RootDomainName
        Type: MX
        TTL: 10800
        ResourceRecords:
          - "10 spool.mail.gandi.net."
          - "50 fb.mail.gandi.net."

Extend DNS records using a new deployment step e.g.

    name: "Infrastructure: Deploy web stack (extend)"
    run: >-
      bash "scripts/deploy/deploy-stack.sh" \
        --template-file ../site/.infrastructure/dns-records.yaml \
        --stack-name undergroundwires-web-stack-extend \
        --parameter-overrides "DnsStackName=undergroundwires-dns-stack RootDomainName=undergroundwires.dev" \
        --region us-east-1 \
        --role-arn ${{secrets.AWS_WEB_STACK_DEPLOYMENT_ROLE_ARN}} \
        --profile user --session ${{ env.SESSION_NAME }}
    working-directory: aws

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Examples

https://privacy.sexy | repository | github actions workflow
https://cloudarchitecture.io
https://erkinekici.com
Send a pull request to add your site here!

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64 chars for roles - 14 chars used by AWS - 21 chars longest role name (ResolveCertLambdaRole) + 1 hypens = 28 chars ↩

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 5 Commits
.github/workflows		.github/workflows
img		img
pipelines		pipelines
scripts		scripts
stacks		stacks
.markdownlint.json		.markdownlint.json
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
README.md		README.md

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