Hacker News Reader

Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

Book co-author here. (Not article author.)

The recommendation against using S3 for static hosting is that there are much better alternatives outside of AWS. The dev experience you get with Netlify and Zeit will almost certainly never be possible with AWS.

View on HN

Not to refute your claim, but this is my 3-line bash script in order to build and upload a static bundle:

"""

#!/usr/bin/env bash

rm -rf public

hugo --verbose

aws s3 sync ./public s3://$BUCKET_NAME --profile s3_personal

"""

You can set custom TTL for CloudFront to 0 for instant refresh in production. Dev server is `hugo server`, `hugo` is a single Go binary you can Dockerize with --net=host and --volume=$(pwd):/app to use your own dev environment. If you don't maintain too many large static assets, your cost is like 5 cents a month, and I think that's a competitive price, not AWS being generous. $12 / year for a custom domain via ICANN, and Route 53 manages A/AAAA/CNAME/MX records for free.

Again, not to refute your claim. I'm a single author, who publishes as a hobby, with a single dev and a single prod environment, so if things break down (it hasn't for years), it's easy to fix. It's much different than content marketing and enterprise use cases. Even so, I would rather start here and add a static CMS like Forestry before considering a custom solution like Netlify (which is probably built on top of AWS anyways).

Add a “set -e” unless you want to publish a failed build.

I actually noticed I had a few incorrect dates, about two weeks after I published the posts. One annoying thing about hugo server is that you can't see draft posts timestamped in the future, which makes it hard to schedule things. My stack definitely could use improvement in a real-life production setting :)

There’s a Hugo flag for buildFuture. I have it turned on in Netlify branch deploys and off in prod. ;-)

Whether that helps or not depends on how the script is called. Unfortunately. Better to check the result of the command and call exit explicitly if you want to be sure.

Also Netlify doesn't scale in pricing as well. 3 developers is $45 a month, but 4 developers is $1000 a month. There's also no SLA until the $1000 a month tier. They charge almost double for extra bandwidth. It's great for small teams, but they're not objectively better.

Never used Netlify, but that seems odd. Isn't it a hosting provider? Unless you're really tiny team, usually you'd want a centralized process for running the build & deploy (rather than having any developer that wants to release something running the build on their slightly different local environment and deploying it directly), possibly hooked into a CD pipeline. Why do you need to pay per developer?

Here's their pricing page: https://www.netlify.com/pricing/

Looks like you can add extra developers on the lower tiers for $15/user/month, but they're still charging way more per GB than AWS does.

That's pretty cray-cray. I feel like you could just create a CloudFormation template, have a "Launch Stack" button, and get people to pay you to maintain it for $10 / user / month and have a company easy-peasy. Throw in backups via Batch, I think they use EC2 Spot instances so its crazy cheap.

I get that you should always charge more if possible, but I'm much more concerned with surviving during hard times, and there's just less to ablate away if you stick more or less to first principles.

My script looks very similar to yours, but with an additional (and optional) CloudFront cache invalidation step (on `/*`).

Netlify does branch deploys. I’ve hosted on S3+CF and Netlify. Both have their place, but Netlify has a great developer UX. S3 does not.

Not refuting the UX point. It’s possible (at most an hour of work) to set up webhook-based deploys to s3. Not as turnkey as Netlify, but it is very possible to build your own great developer UX with a bit of elbow grease and pipes :).

If your time frame for hosting is 10+ years, I’d personally recommend to put your eggs in s3, (or the “s3 interface”, to be specific; whether it’s with AWS, DO, etc).

That's not hard. What I'm talking about is giving each PR its own unique domain URL. That's a much bigger pain in the ass with S3+CF. I'm not even sure it can be done quickly because starting a new CF distribution takes like 10 minutes. I guess you'd need to hook into Route 53 somewhere or something?

S3+CF static hosting has a great interface, they just wrapped it in nice UI and called it Amplify Console.

I could never figure out the Amplify docs. Maybe I was stuck in the marketing part of it, but I never saw something that stated clearly what it is or how it works. It was like "just click a, then b, then c" which is not useful for understanding what it's actually doing.

So, is Amplify just a simplified interface to S3+CF?

One benefit Netlify has is that it keeps a reference to multiple deploys, so you can always go back or deploy a development branch separately from production. Plus it does the building for you, which for a Hugo site is not really important but in our case (product website + shop) we used Gatsby which pulled data from several data sources (= secure access keys that ideally don't linger on dev machines).

You can already build automatically in GitHub Actions and Git saves your previous versions as well. No need for Netlify.

AWS Amplify makes it incredibly simple to do deploy a static website to s3 with cloud front in front of it.

Includes CD and Amplify itself (like Cloudformation) is free, you only pay for the resources you make.

AWS Amplify has been out for a couple years now, and it is also able to automate much more than just static websites.

So taking a look at the 2 options you mention, I am not seeing anything that those do that Amplify does not (but the opposite is not true, Amplify does a lot of things for you out of the box)

I agree that AWS doesn't yet provide a clean all-in-one package for static website hosting. I think AWS Amplify Console [1] is the current official "all-in-one" service but I haven't used it.

With the recent GA of AWS CDK [2] I would say that it is getting more and more possible to define your own development workflow that is tailored to your own static website hosting needs and better than just raw S3. AWS CDK is still difficult to use with some rough edges, and I know that setting up e.g. a CodePipeline and CI/CD is difficult.

Here is the CDK example for hosting a S3 origin + CloudFront CDN + custom TLS certificate + CloudFront invalidation on deployments static website [3]. Here is my personal version of it combining Hugo that took me a day to set up [4]. Still complicated, lot of rough edges, but offers a pleasant dev experience [5], I haven't yet built up a CI/CD pipeline.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS but my views are my own.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/console/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/

[3] https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples/blob/master/...

[4] https://github.com/asimihsan/asim_ihsan_io/blob/master/cdk/s...

[5] https://github.com/asimihsan/asim_ihsan_io/blob/master/READM...

> I agree that AWS doesn't yet provide a clean all-in-one package for static website hosting. I think AWS Amplify Console [1] is the current official "all-in-one" service but I haven't used it.

That's exactly what Amplify Console is, and it's really good.

After initial configuration it's literally one command using the AWS cli to upload your site to s3.

I don't understand the eagerness to trade-off $/user instead of $/bandwidth (which is far, far cheaper in nearly every case) just to save a day or two of learning how to use a tool.

> The dev experience you get with Netlify and Zeit will almost certainly never be possible with AWS.

For static hosting, AWS Amplify is already a very similar experience to Netlify. Each is slightly better than the other in some ways, but overall they are really very similar.

I find the experience using AWS Amplify Console to be great, not dissimilar to Zeit or Netlify. It's a 'productisation' of the S3 and Cloudfront pattern and does its job very well imho. https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/console/

Firebase Hosting is superior to any of those alternatives you mentioned (netlify, amplify, zeit etc) in terms of capability. With the added benefit of tight integration with other firebase products (analytics, authentication and cloud storage).

Based on this and other comments of yours in the thread, it feels like you have some vested interest in advertising "Netlify and Zelt" (whatever those are) without declaring your interest in them.

If you truly have no interest in them other than as a user, then it seems as if you're not aware of alternatives such as AWS Amplify. You haven't responded to any of the comments pointing out the issues with your claims.

Whatever book you're a co-author of doesn't sound as though it's worth the price.

Other than for DX, is there a reason to go with Netlify or Zeit? I personally don't care about this.

I too, prefer to know how the sausage is made.

There's a much better alternative outside of AWS for everything that AWS provides.

As far as I can tell, AWS exists to optimize accounting and inter-departmental friction, and not to solve any technical problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com