A static export behind a CDN is fast, cheap, and almost impossible to knock over. Here's the architecture we reach for by default — and when we don't.
Most marketing sites don't need a server. They need to be fast everywhere, resilient under a traffic spike, and cheap to run when nobody's looking. A fully static build served from Amazon S3 through Amazon CloudFront delivers all three — and this very site runs on exactly that stack.
The shape of it
- A private S3 bucket holds the built assets — no public access.
- CloudFront serves them globally over HTTPS, with an Origin Access Control so only the CDN can read the bucket.
- A tiny CloudFront function rewrites clean URLs to the right index.html.
- Route 53 and an ACM certificate handle DNS and TLS for the apex and www.
Why it wins
There's no origin server to patch, scale, or pay for at idle. Cache hits are served from the edge in milliseconds. Deploys are just an object sync plus a cache invalidation — atomic enough that rollbacks are trivial.
When we don't
The moment a site needs authenticated, per-user, or truly real-time content, static export stops being the right tool. For those, we reach for server rendering on AWS compute — but we keep everything that can be static, static.
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