Starting My Portfolio

Setting Up My Static Website

Today I completed the first major step in developing my Cloud Engineering skills within the AWS ecosystem: I built a simple static website using S3, CloudFront, Route 53, and Certificate Manager. Since this is all new to me, I leaned on Perplexity.ai to help map out a step-by-step process.

The first task was to route an existing domain name I had registered through Squarespace using Route 53. I chose not to transfer the domain to Route 53 yet—instead, I redirected traffic to my new site using Route 53. I wanted to avoid the 24-hour propagation delay that comes with a full transfer and opted for the quicker, simpler option. I may transfer the domain fully later on, but for now this setup works fine.

Next, I downloaded Hugo, an open-source static website generator. This involved some basic technical steps, like downloading pre-built binaries for Windows. I chose the extended version since it seemed most relevant for my needs. After creating the site and testing it locally, I wrote my first blog post to introduce myself and my learning goals.

With the site ready, I used AWS S3 buckets to host the content. Thanks to Hugo’s pre-built binaries, all the necessary website files were generated automatically, making it easy to upload the /public folder directly into my S3 bucket. The files were then broken out into the appropriate subfolders within the bucket.

Next, I set up a CloudFront distribution. I selected my S3 bucket as the origin, enabled HTTP-to-HTTPS redirection, added domain aliases, and configured an SSL certificate. Since I didn’t have a certificate yet, I used AWS Certificate Manager to generate a new one and linked it to my CloudFront distribution.

Finally, I configured Route 53 to direct traffic for my domain brobotbuilds.com. In my existing hosted zone (US-East/Virginia), I added an A Record and a CNAME Record to include my site aliases. Once everything was configured, it was just a matter of waiting for DNS propagation.

This was my first hands-on experience building a static website using AWS tools. It wasn’t without a few hiccups, but I learned a ton in the process. As I move forward, I’ll continue building on this foundation and adding new capabilities to the site.