Results at a glance
- EC2web servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- ELBload balancer in front of the web tier
- Route 53DNS for the domain
- HTTPSCloudflare SSL for encrypted traffic
The goal
Put a website on AWS so it is reachable, encrypted and ready to scale, instead of a single server with a plain HTTP port open to the world.
What I built
- EC2 web servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, hardened and configured to serve the site.
- Elastic Load Balancer in front of the web tier, so traffic is spread out and more instances can be added without changing DNS.
- Route 53 for the domain's DNS records.
- Cloudflare SSL so visitors connect over HTTPS, with certificates managed in one place.
- Security groups that only open what the site needs.
Decisions
- Load balancer from day one. Even with little traffic, an ELB means the site can grow (or survive a failed instance) without a redesign.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Matches the enterprise environments the setup was meant to mirror, with long-term support.
Outcome
A secure, production-ready website on AWS with encrypted traffic, a load-balanced web tier and clean DNS, a pattern I now reuse for client deployments.
