More and more, e-commerce businesses turn to serverless and cost-efficient hosting solutions from AWS, often combining CloudFront with S3, alongside other AWS services and third party APIs.

Let’s take a real-life example: a common challenge encountered in e-commerce is the graceful conclusion of a ‘flash sales’ event on a predefined date and time. Ensuring a seamless transition as these sales come to an end, is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction and fostering long-term loyalty.

In this case you want to avoid website redeployments or server-side changes. You could make use of a simple URL redirect ‘toggle switch’.
Enter AWS’s power at the edge : AWS CloudFront Functions and CloudFront KeyValueStore!

This blog post will explore how I used this simple, yet powerful (and new!) KeyValueStore feature to redirect users after sales end, without server-side headaches or code changes.

Creating a Seamless User Experience with CloudFront Functions :

CloudFront Functions brings computation to the edge, closer to the user, which results in lightning-fast execution. By attaching a function to my CloudFront distribution and linking it to a KeyValueStore, I could easily manage the flash sales states with minimal effort. The function checks a value in the KeyValueStore and if it’s “off,” users are redirected to a “Sale Ended” page.

As you can see in the screenshot of the Cloudfront Functions code, it is pretty straightforward to request the value of a key and then use it in your function logic.

Now you can use the value of the “Sales” KeyValue in your function logic.
This example performs a redirect when the Flash Sales has ended :

You can probably discover other use cases or solutions built upon this feature, such as A/B testing, feature flags or access authorization based on data stored in the KeyValueStore.

Stay tuned for more posts, where I’ll dive deeper into the benefits of AWS serverless technologies, helping you tap into the potential of the cloud for your e-commerce and other application needs!

Do not underestimate the power of AWS Cloudfront Functions: it has supersonic execution times for your Viewer requests and Viewer Responses. Think about cache-key and header manipulation, access authorization at the Edge. And as mentioned, nifty URL rewrite and redirect capabilities.

In one of my upcoming blog posts, I will be adding more functionalities to Cloudfront/S3 web applications. So don’t miss out on the insights – follow our blog and join me on this journey to unlock the full potential of serverless architectures with AWS!

Conclusion:

CloudFront Functions and KeyValueStore simplify redirection after flash sales, showcasing the potency of edge computing.

The post Enhancing redirect strategies with AWS CloudFront Functions and KeyValueStore appeared first on Cloudar.

We recently worked with a customer that had some applications that could be without usage for months. To be more cost efficient, they were looking for a solution where:

• They could turn off as much instances and services as possible
• The users could start the application with one button click if they needed to use it
• The users didn’t have AWS credentials

We came up with the following solution to satisfy these requirements, and if you’re running the same kind of applications, maybe you can also reduce costs by implementing this.

This solutions works by taking advantage of the Route53 health checks. We’ve split up our infrastructure in two parts: an always-on part that uses low cost or usage based services to provide the user with a way to start the real application; and a part that can started and stopped on demand.

We configure the on-demand part to be the primary resource in Route53 and the always-on part as a failover. This way the traffic will be routed to the real application if it’s online, and the user will get a static webpage that gives him the option to start the application if it’s not.

If we look at how this would go if the application is offline, these are the steps that would happen:

1. The user requests the DNS record for application.example.com from Route53. Because the real application is offline, Route53 will respond with the recordset of the fallback CloudFront distribution.
2. The user request a page from CloudFront. CloudFront will get this from S3 and serve it to the user. This page contains an explanation of why the application is not available and a button to start it.
3. When the user clicks the button, it uses javascript to call the API Gateway and invoke a lambda function.
4. The lambda function calls Service Catalog or CloudFormation (depending on your environment) to start the real application
5. When the application has started, the health check will pass, and Route53 will start returning the recordset for the CloudFront distribution that is linked to the application
6. When the user uses the new DNS records, it will go through the second CloudFront distribution and to the real application

Some things to keep in mind.

This only a high level overview of a possible solution. To implement this, you would also have to consider the following:

• After starting the Application, the static webpage should refresh the page, to force the browser to do a new DNS lookup.
• CloudFront will cache errors for 5 minutes by default. Decreasing this will make the failover go faster.
• The TTL of an CloudFront DNS record is 60 seconds

The post Using Route53 to support on-demand applications appeared first on Cloudar.