Forem: Roberto Battaglia

Deploying Static Websites with AWS CloudFront and S3

Roberto Battaglia — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 20:35:51 +0000

When it comes to hosting static websites, AWS offers a powerful combination of S3 and CloudFront that can significantly improve performance while keeping costs low. In this guide, I'll walk you through setting up a production-ready static website using CloudFront as a CDN in front of S3.

Why CloudFront + S3?

Before diving into the implementation, let's understand why this setup is beneficial:

Global Performance: CloudFront caches your content at edge locations worldwide, reducing latency for users regardless of their location
Cost Efficiency: S3 storage is cheap, and CloudFront data transfer costs are often lower than direct S3 access
Security: You can keep your S3 bucket private while serving content publicly through CloudFront
SSL/TLS: Easy HTTPS implementation with AWS Certificate Manager

Prerequisites

You'll need:

An AWS account
A domain name (optional but recommended)
Your static website files (HTML, CSS, JS, images, etc.)

Step 1: Setting Up Your S3 Bucket

Have a look at my previous article to serve a website with S3 and skip Step 4.

Step 2: Create a CloudFront Distribution

Now let's set up CloudFront to serve your content:

Go to the CloudFront console
Click "Create distribution"
For "Origin domain", select your S3 bucket
Important: Click "Use website endpoint" - this ensures proper routing for SPA applications. In order to use it, your bucket must be public
Keep default settings for other options
Click "Create distribution"

The distribution will take a few minutes to deploy. Once ready, you can find the CloudFront URL in General > Details > Distribution domain name. You can test it to see if the website content is accessible from it.

Step 3: Custom Domain Setup (Optional)

To use your own domain:

Configure DNS:

In Route 53, create an A record pointing to your CloudFront distribution
Create another A record for www pointing to the same distribution

Create SSL Certificate:

Go to AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)
Request a certificate for yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com
Use DNS validation as validation method

Update CloudFront Distribution:

Go to your Cloudfront distribution settings
Click on "General" and then under the "Settings" section click on "Edit"
Set the domain specified your ACM certificate (yourdomain.com) in Alternate domain name (CNAME)
Select the ACM certificate
Save

Redirect traffic from HTTP to HTTPS:

Click on "Behaviours" from Cloudfront distribution settings
Select the behaviour and edit it
Set Viewer protocol policy to Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
Save

Step 4: Cache Management

CloudFront caches your content, so updates won't appear immediately if the content has already been served before and didn't expire. To invalidate the cache:

Go to your CloudFront distribution
Click "Invalidations" tab
Create invalidation with path /*
Wait for completion (just a few minutes)

Advanced: Private S3 Bucket Setup

I've written another tutorial on how to set up this architecture with a private bucket. Go have a read if you're interested. Otherwise, you can directly have a look at the full guide which includes all the steps starting from S3 bucket creation

Cost Considerations

While this setup is cost-effective, be mindful of:

CloudFront data transfer costs (though often cheaper than direct S3)
Cache invalidation costs ($0.005 per invalidation path)
SSL certificate costs (free with ACM)

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Website not loading: Check bucket permissions and CloudFront origin settings
HTTPS errors: Verify SSL certificate is properly attached to CloudFront
Cache issues: Create cache invalidation and wait for completion
Routing problems: Ensure you're using the S3 website endpoint, not the bucket endpoint

Conclusion

This CloudFront + S3 setup provides a robust, scalable solution for hosting static websites. The combination offers excellent performance, security, and cost-effectiveness for most use cases.

For a more comprehensive guide covering advanced scenarios like private buckets, check out this complete AWS static website deployment guide.

The real power of this setup is its simplicity. Once configured, it requires minimal maintenance while providing production-ready stability and low latency

CI/CD Building a pipeline used by multiple repositories with Jenkins and Artifactory integration

Roberto Battaglia — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 14:31:38 +0000

Read this article directly from my website by clicking here

Do you want to use the same pipeline for hundreds of projects without adding a Jenkinsfile to each repo? This guide is for you!

In the section A I'm going to show how a single pipeline can be executed automatically by a commit to any of my repositories. I'm using Remote File Plugin, which allows you to make a single Jenkinsfile be triggerable automatically by any of your repos. The main advantage of this method is to automate the creation of the jobs. A similar result can be reached also by using Pipeline Shared Groovy Libraries Plugin, that can give you more flexibility in case you want to introduce differences on how every repo is built, but the downside is that you still have to create a Jenkinsfile for each project.
Even if I’m using Bitbucket (based on Git), this can be easily replaced with Github or any other versioning control tools supported by Jenkins.

In the section B I'm going to build a pipeline that execute a Maven build, resolving the dependencies from Artifactory, and then publish the artifacts and the buildinfo to Artifactory.
Eventually I'll test this pipeline on two repositories in which one depends on the other.

A. Set up a pipeline for multiple repositories

1. Add a webhook on your BitBucket repositories to trigger the Jenkins job when a commit is pushed. The URL is just the address of the machine where Jenkins is installed + /bitbucket-hook/. Make it sure to write the “/” at the end of the URL because it’ll not work without it.

2. Create a Jenkins Job by clicking on New Item > Bitbucket Team/Project (you need Bitbucket Branch Source Plugin for this).

Put your bitbucket owner and credentials under Projects. Under Local File insert "pom.xml", so that Jenkins can recognize to trigger the pipeline for every repository that has a pom. After doing so, your job will be able to scan automatically all your projects.
Create a repository containing only a Jenkinsfile with the pipeline that you want to be executed for all of your repositories. If you're interested about integrating Maven builds with Artifactory you can find an example of a pipeline in the next section, otherwise just make it sure to have the bitbucket trigger to make it work:

pipeline {
    ...
    triggers {
        bitbucketPush()
    }
    ...
}

Connect your Jenkinsfile to your job. Go to the job configuration, under Projects click on Add > Remote File Plugin (you need to install Remote File Plugin), then add the informations to access the repo containing your pipeline, and specify the name of the script that you want to be triggerable.

From now on, if you want to add one more project, you just have to Scan Organization Folder; afterwards the pipeline will be called every time you push to your new repo. You can also automatize the scan operation by easily setting a periodical scan trigger in the configuration page of your Bitbucket Team/Project.

B. Integrate with JFrog Artifactory

1. Configure Maven and JDK on Manage Jenkins > Global Tool Configuration


^{N.B. Use “Install Automatically” only if Jenkins is running on a RedHat machine, otherwise it will throw an IllegalArgumentException}

2. Create the repositories on Artifactory

Create a local repository on Artifactory

Create a virtual repository containing the local one

3. Configure Artifactory on Jenkins on Manage Jenkins > Configure System

In order to resolve your dependencies from Artifactory when a build is executed on Jenkins, you need to set the settings.xml

Generate settings.xml from Artifactory by going on your virtual repository and then Set Me Up > Generate Maven Settings
Go on Manage Jenkins > Managed Files > Add a new Config and insert your settings.xml here (you need Config File Provider Plugin)
If you want to resolve the dependencies from Artifactory during your local builds as well, put the settings.xml also at %USERPROFILE%.m2\settings.xml. Your repository configuration should look like this:

4. Write your pipeline. Here is my Jenkinsfile (I'm using the declarative syntax):

If you want to use it automatically on multiple projects, you just have to push this file to the repository declared on the Remote File Plugin part of A.2

5. Try it out! I have two repositories on bitbucket: jenkins-project1 and jenkins-project2. The latter depends on the former, so that I can test whether the dependencies are resolved from Artifactory correctly. Let’s try building project1 and then project2

Congratulations! You successfully integrated Artifactory and Jenkins with multiple repository by creating only one pipeline. If you want to have a look of the projects that I built on this tutorial, you can find them on GitHub.