David Clinton
Outline
All the tutorials in this course:
- Understanding the Static Website Universe
- Building a Static Website on S3
- Optimizing Website Security and Performance
- Working With the Hugo Static Site Generator
Great to see you here! Allow me to quickly introduce myself so you can get to the content without any any unnecessary delay.
I'm an AWS solutions architect and Linux server administrator from Toronto, Canada. I've been creating technology training content for more than a decade. In that time, more than 60,000 of my books were sold and more than a half a million people just like you viewed my video courses.
Let's see whether I can deliver some solid value to you, too.
One general note: You're perfectly welcome to simply watch the videos and absorb the information. But actually getting your hands dirty by running everything you see here on your own machine will give the information a real turbo-boost. Keep an eye on the notes to each lesson for code and guides that'll help you recreate all of the demos you'll see here.
If you've ever dreamed of a way to create and publish a website that's simple, secure, highly-available, and super-inexpensive, but that doesn't require you to deploy and administrate complex, multi-layered servers, then I think you should stick around for this course.
Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against complex, multi-layered servers. Much of my career has been spent working with just such creatures. But monitoring, troubleshooting, and babysitting them can be a bit of a handful. And if your workload doesn't require all that complexity and cost, then I'd say "grab it."
Sound interesting? So say hello to the enterprise-quality object storage platform, Amazon S3. This course exists to introduce you to the concept of hosting static websites on S3, and then showing you how to configure those sites so they're highly available to your users and reliably secure - all through integration with a couple of other Amazon Web Services.
Since building websites just won't work without website content, I'll also show you how Hugo - a popular static website generator - handles your HTML resources and connects them with hosting platforms like S3.
What will you need to successfully complete this course? Number one, an Amazon Web Services account. Opening an account is free - especially when you factor in the Free Tier access to services that accounts get in their first year. But making mistakes with your AWS account can lead to scary and unexpected bills. As an AWS Solutions Architect and the author of multiple books on working with AWS, I'll make sure that none of the activities discussed in this course will lead you to any surprises on that front.
Besides that AWS account, I expect you'll also have at least the basic concept for your project. Why else build a website, after all? You'll need some familiarity with working with terminals on your machine - whether it's running Windows, macOS, or Linux. If you choose to also follow along with my Hugo demos, it would be helpful to understand Markdown syntax. But, as you can see from this Markdown cheat sheet, that's not at all hard to pick up.