No Server Required - Jekyll & Amazon S3

While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile.<p>You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted <i>nor even charged</i> with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman.<p>This could be an issue for reasons like...<p>-You make a Web app that Hollywood deems to somehow encourage or abet piracy<p>-You provide a service used by a customer deemed to be politically controversial<p>-You facilitate financial transactions deemed to be potential helpful to "terrorists" or the wrong sort of activists (e.g. Wikileaks).<p>Werner, since you submitted this entry from your personal blog, maybe you could clarify what safeguards Amazon has put in place to prevent a repeat of the Wikileaks situation. Many companies will stand behind a customer barring a court order, but for Amazon this clearly is not the case. How do you decide when to abandon a customer?

If you go to the bottom of the page at <a href="http://allthingsdistributed.com/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsdistributed.com/</a>, you'll see that the blog actually requires "Movable Type Pro".<p>AWS doesn't provide a way to serve from S3 without the help of a CNAME redirect, which means that you're out of luck if you want to use the Jekyll+S3 setup with a naked domain name (naked, as in no "www" or "blog" subdomain). And it also means that you're going to have to get some other server (Google Apps can do it), to redirect your *.domain.com queries to www.domain.com. And then your users' DNS is running all over the place, incurring, in my opinion, unneeded delay.

If you want to get really exotic, you can check out the Haskell version of this tool. My site (<a href="http://dave.fayr.am" rel="nofollow">http://dave.fayr.am</a>) does the same thing using Hakyll and S3. You can see the code here: <a href="https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/KirinDave/public-website</a>

Except for the servers at Disqus which are running the comment system. And the servers serving up the static HTML pages.

Any open source alternatives to Disqus that I could host myself? I don't want to use Disqus - apart from wanting to "own" my comments, it is also incompatible with my browser configuration (blocking 3rd party cookies).

Coming from the CTO of Amazon...

This is a pretty over-used subject for blog submissions here on HN, see previous ones at <a href="https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+jekyll+S3" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinato...</a>

I remember running this type of setup back in 2003 with text files and Blosxom. What's old is new again?

I started using a method really similar to this to host a blog a few months ago, shortly after the S3 static website feature was released. However, shortly after a post ended up on the front page of hacker news, requests to anything on the S3 bucket started responding with 503 errors.<p>Not entirely sure what the issue was, since I use S3 to host static assets for other sites that see similar traffic levels, and haven't gotten any 503 errors. And clearly ATD seems to be handling the HN traffic just fine.

I actually made a Ruby gem to do exactly this on a repeatable basis for my own site.<p>Here's the code: <a href="https://github.com/ohrite/vacation" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ohrite/vacation</a> Here's the gem: <a href="http://rubygems.org/gems/vacation" rel="nofollow">http://rubygems.org/gems/vacation</a>

It's an interesting use case. However, if you have almost static content you can also make use of heavy caching. That is a low end dynamic site with a powerful caching/delivery layer. I guess this is also doable with Amazon Cloudfront. It is all about how comfortable it is to update your site.

This is awesome. I was going to put my blog onto GitHub (you know, being a hacker it just makes sense since I already pay for it anyway), but it is intriguing to be able to put it on S3, especially with CloudFront.

Is it just me or is the site down?