How it works?

ManBehindLens.com - static website to share publicly my pictures.

There are two modules:

• A static website - publicly accessible website,
• An admin web application - password protected web application used to generate the static website on demand.

Whenever I upload new pictures I generate the static website by clicking a button. Since I upload pictures at most once a day, this system works perfectly for me.

Architecture

The following figure describes the application serverless architecture on AWS:

Serverless architectures are self-contained architectures that don’t need to run, maintain servers. You only pay for the use of services, not servers. Your application still runs on servers, but AWS does all the server management for you. You no longer have to provision, scale, and maintain servers to run your applications, databases, and storage systems.

The admin web application is build using AWS Amplify. AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services that enables mobile and front-end web developers to build secure, scalable full stack applications, powered by AWS.

Demo

In the video below you can see how the static website and the admin web application work:

Advantages of a static website:

• pre-rendered static HTML of static sites loads much faster than the pages on a dynamic site. Fast websites are really important for a good user experience, and also for boosting your site in search engine rankings,
• static site generators reduce site complexity,
• you don’t have to worry about database-toppling traffic spikes,
• lower costs,
• very good SEO.

Source code

You can get the full sourcecode on my github.

Costs

All services used benefit from Free Tier offers. The AWS Free Tier provides the ability to use AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service.

The below screenshot highlights one month of usage: