Hosting a website on AWS

Did you know that you can use CloudFormation to create and host a website on AWS?

I've been playing with EC2 to get the feel for AWS and in the process stumbled on a fun demo you can try--plus a few gotchas you might want to know before you try it.

I found a cool video, How to Launch a Website in 10 Minutes, on the AWS channel on YouTube. Basically, you create an S3 bucket to hold the website's resources, then you use CloudFormation to create an EC2 and an RDS instance, and install WordPress (and content) in the bucket. Very slick. It was a nicely done quick intro; however, I ran into a few issues:

• It's not under the free usage tier. The online docs (but not the video) warn you: this does cost money. The app also warns you when you create the EC2 and RDS instances. You're supposed to delete the instances as soon as you're done with the tutorial.
• The video tells you to select Upload a Template File (for the WordPress installation), but didn't say where to get the file. Apparently there are 2 or 3 different ways to specify a template. This can be confusing for a newbie. The online AWS tutorial is clear on this point, though.

It was a simple procedure--here are the basic steps:

• In the S3 tab, create a bucket and name it appropriately for your blog, e.g. amazing-blog.
• In the EC2 tab, if you do not already have an available Linux instance, create one.
• Upload all image files or other resources your blog will need to the bucket you just created.
• In the CloudFormation tab, click Create new stack. In the Create Stack dialog, provide the name of the bucket you created for the blog as the stack name.
• In Template, select Provide a Template URL, then type or paste the URL for the sample WordPress template, then click Continue. (This procedure is from the AWS docs; it's not noted in the video.)

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/WordPress_Single_Instance_With_RDS.template

The template contains several AWS resources including a LoadBalancer, an Amazon Relational Database Service DB Instance, and an Auto Scaling group.

• In the Parameters section of the dialog, provide the key name of an existing EC2 instance.

Cool idea, but is it worth it?

I left the WordPress website up for a few days to create fake content and mess with formatting. Then I noticed the meter was ticking on the EC2 and RDS instances. I did get charged a bit. To be fair, I was warned. The docs warn you about this, and instruct you to delete the resources as soon as you're done. The management console indicated an estimated monthly cost of $110. I'm not certain that the service comes to that much in real life usage, but it could be a very expensive blog!

IMO this demo was done more of a proof of concept--and a worthy idea. It could be worthwhile if your website required considerable web resources--for example, you had a large database of streaming audio files, or a catalog that would require a sizable relational database. But for your own personal blog, or even a small business website as demonstrated in the YouTube video, it's probably not a cost-effective option.

I admit I was taken with the idea of spinning up your own virtual hosting site, and I wish that AWS would offer a scaled down economy plan (not free but cheap...) for those who just want to spin up and discard experimental websites easily.

XMLHttpRequest2 in HTML5

I'm just now learning about HTML5; at first I shrugged it off as an inevitable evolutionary fusion of HTML 4 and XHTML 1.1. Yet it's not just a markup language; it's more an extended hybrid language that embraces and supports several application programming interfaces (APIs) for web applications. It's an open format that would allow development of cross-platform web or mobile applications.

For me personally, the most interesting inclusion is XMLHttpRequest support. Specifically, XMLHttpRequest Level 2.

As the HTML5 Rocks blog points out, it's being included to allow AJAX to work with HTML5 APIs such as File System API, Web Audio API, and these would support binary file transfer and streaming media. It's all spelled out in this excellent post: New Tricks in XMLHttpRequest2.

What's surprising to me is the lack of mention of the implication for RESTful web services. It seems that XMLHttpRequest support would be a major step forward in streamlining interoperability with web services, because--in theory--you'd be able to make RESTful requests directly from a web page. How would this implementation look in actual use? I'm thinking AJAX-like web page elements that can be updated by web services in real time.