AWS

These notes were written while working through the A Cloud Guru AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate online course. These notes are partly from the videos, and also from various other online sources. Primarily, they’re notes for me, but you might find them useful too.

Since the AWS platform is changing so quickly, it’s possible that some of these notes may be out of date, so please take that into consideration if you are reading them.

These notes were written while working through the A Cloud Guru AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate online course. These notes are partly from the videos, and also from various other online sources. Primarily, they’re notes for me, but you might find them useful too.

Since the AWS platform is changing so quickly, it’s possible that some of these notes may be out of date, so please take that into consideration if you are reading them.

I completed the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam in November 2017, after about eight weeks study, with a score of 85%.

Below are a series links to blog posts containing all my study notes, and finally, another blog post containing my thoughts on the exam, as well as some exam feedback and tips for those who will sit the exam after me.

I recently migrated my mattbutton.com blog away from Wordpress hosting in favor of a static site generated by Hugo, hosted on Amazon S3.

Initially, I hosted the static site via Aerobatic.io, who recently removed their free tier, and started charging $15 per month for hosting with a custom domain.. 50% more than the $10 per month I was previously paying for Hostgator Wordpress hosting. Unless I have certain specific requirements, I can’t justfy that kind of cost to host a static site.

Aerobatic.io are using Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront behind the scenes, so I decided to cut out the middle-man, set it up myself, and save nearly $15 per month.

Setting up the S3 bucket to host my site was fine. For the CDN/SSL side of things I initially tried using CloudFront because most of the AWS Hugo Hosting, HowTo guides were using it.

When trying to set up CloudFront via my personal AWS account, I got an error saying a distribution already exists for mattbutton.com. The reason for this error is because Aerobatic.io had already created a CloudFront distribution pointing to their own S3 bucket. CloudFront isn’t an option for me until Aerobatic.io delete their mattbutton.com CloudFront distribution.

I still wanted to use SSL, and had decided on setting up mattbutton.com with it mainly out of interest, partly because Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal, and partly because Chrome will eventually show a Not Secure warning for all pages served over HTTP.

Since AWS CloudFront wasn’t an option, I decided on using the CloudFlare free plan for SSL and CDN. Everything went well, until I encountered a CloudFlare 502 Bad Gateway error page:

I wasn’t having any luck searching for a solution to this error for this particular error. Fortunately, there’s a simple fix, if you know what you’re looking for, and you’re happy with the trade-offs involved.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to host a sample Python web app on Elastic Beanstalk, using HTTPS, without a load balancer.

After following the steps in this blog post, you should end up with something that looks like the following image: