Serverless static website - part 9

One of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is the ability to automate processes and up to this point, we've learned how to set everything up via AWS console web interface.

Why automate?

It is always good to know how to manage stuff via console in case we need to manually modify something, but we should aim to avoid this practice. Instead, limit the use of the console to a bare minimum and the rest of the time, aim for some automated way, this has the following advantages:

• We can keep source code / templates under source control, allowing to keep track of changes.
• It can be reused to replicate in case of a new customer / new environment / etc.
• No need to remember where every single option is located as the UI can change.
• It can be transferred to another account in a matter of a few minutes.

In AWS world, the automated process is achieved by creating templates in CloudFormation and deploying them to stacks.

I have already created a couple of CloudFormation templates to automate all the process described to this point, they can be found at my GitHub repo.

CloudFormation templates

In order to automate this infrastructure, I've divided resources into two separate templates: one containing the SSL certificate and the other containing all the rest of the resources. The reason why the SSL certificate is in another template is because it needs to be run on N. Virginia region (US-East-1) as explained earlier when we created it manually, it's a CloudFront requirement.

Templates can contain parameters that make them more flexible, in this case, there is a parameter that controls the creation of a redirection bucket, we might have a scenario when we want just a website on a sub domain and we might not want to redirect from the naked domain. These are the parameters:

SSL Certificate template

• DomainName: The site domain name (naked domain only)

Infrastructure template

• HostedZone: This is just for reference, it should not be changed
• SSLCertificate: This should be taken from the output of the SSL certificate template
• DomainName: Same as above, only naked domain
• SubDomainName: specific sub domain, typically www
• IncludeRedirectToSubDomain: Whether it should include a redirection bucket from the naked domain to the subdomain

Creating SSL certificate Stack

First, let's make sure we are in N. Virginia region. Go to CloudFormation console, once there, click Create Stack button. We are presented with Select Template screen, where we'll choose a template from my repository (ssl-certificate.yaml) by selecting Upload a template to Amazon S3 radio button.

Click Next, you'll see the input parameters page including the stack name which I'll name abelperez-info-ssl-stack to give it some meaningful name.

After entering the required information, click Next and Next again, then on Create button. You'll see the Create in progress status in the stack.

At this point, the SSL certificate is being created and will require the identity verification just like when it was created manually, this will block the stack creation until the validation process is finished, so go ahead and check your email and follow the link to validate the identity to proceed with the stack creation.

Once the creation is done you'll see the Create complete status in the stack, on the lower pane, select Outputs, you'll find SSLCertificateArn. Take that value and copy it somewhere temporarily, we'll need it for our next stack.

Creating Infrastructure Stack

Following a similar process, let's create the second stack containing most of the resources to provision. In this case we are not forced to create it in any specific region, we can choose any provided all the services are available, for this example I'll Ireland (EU-West-1). The template can be downloaded from my repository (infrastructure.yaml).

This time, you are presented a different set of parameters, SSL Certificate will be the output of the previous stack as explained above. Domain name will be exactly the same as in the previous stack, give we are using the SSL certificate for this domain. Subdomain will be www and I'll include a redirection as I expect users to be redirected from abelperez.info to www.abelperez.info. I'll name the stack abelperez-info-infra-stack just to make it meaningful.

Since this template will create IAM users, roles and policies, we need to acknowledge this by ticking the box.

Once we hit Create, we can see the Create in progress screen.

This process can take up to 30 minutes, so please be patient, this takes so long time to create the stack because we are provisioning CloudFront distributions and they can take some time to propagate.

Once the stack is created, we can take note of a couple of values from the output: CodeCommit repository url (either SSH or HTTPS) and the Static bucket name.

Manual steps to finish the set up.

With all resource automatically provisioned by the templates, we are in a position where the only thing we need is to link our local SSH key with the IAM user. To do that, let's do exactly what we did when it was set up manually in part 6.

In my case, I chose to use SSH key, so I went to IAM console, found the user, under Security Credentials, I uploaded my SSH public key.

We also need to update the buildspec.yml to run our build, can be downloaded from the above linked GitHub repository. The placeholder <INSERT-YOUR-BUCKET-NAME-HERE> must be replaced with the actual bucket name, in this instance the bucket name generated is abelperez-info-infra-stack-staticsitebucket-1ur0k115f2757 and my buildspec.yml looks like:

version: 0.2

phases:
  build:
    commands:
      - mkdir dist
      - cp *.html dist/

  post_build:
    commands:
      - aws s3 sync ./dist 
        s3://abelperez-info-infra-stack-staticsitebucket-1ur0k115f2757/ 
        --delete --acl=public-read

Let's test it!

Our test consist of cloning the git repository from CodeCommit, add two files: index.html and buildspec.yml. Then we'll perform a git push and we expect it will trigger the build executing the s3 sync command and copying the index.html to our destination bucket which will be behind CloudFront and CNamed by Route 53. In the end, we should be able to just browse www.abelperez.info and get whatever the result is in index.html just uploaded.

Just a note, if you get a HTTP 403 instead of the expected HTML, then just wait for a few minutes, CloudFront/Route 53 might not be fully propagated just yet.

abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~$ git clone ssh://git-codecommit.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/www.abelperez.info-web
Cloning into 'www.abelperez.info-web'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~$ cd www.abelperez.info-web/
abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~/www.abelperez.info-web$ git add buildspec.yml index.html 
abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~/www.abelperez.info-web$ git commit -m "initial commit"
[master (root-commit) dc40888] initial commit
 Committer: Abel Perez Martinez 
Your name and email address were configured automatically based
on your username and hostname. Please check that they are accurate.
You can suppress this message by setting them explicitly. Run the
following command and follow the instructions in your editor to edit
your configuration file:

    git config --global --edit

After doing this, you may fix the identity used for this commit with:

    git commit --amend --reset-author

 2 files changed, 16 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 buildspec.yml
 create mode 100644 index.html
abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~/www.abelperez.info-web$ git push
Counting objects: 4, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 480 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 4 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://git-codecommit.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/www.abelperez.info-web
 * [new branch]      master -> master
abel@ABEL-DESKTOP:~/www.abelperez.info-web$ curl https://www.abelperez.info
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello from S3 bucket :) </h1>
</body>
</html>