125. A first look at CloudFront Hosting Toolkit

In this episode, we discuss the newly announced CloudFront Hosting Toolkit from AWS. We provide an overview of the tool, which aims to simplify deploying modern front-end applications to AWS while retaining infrastructure control. We discuss the current capabilities and limitations and share our hands-on experiences trying out the tool. We also talk about alternatives like Vercel and Amplify, and the tradeoffs between convenience VS control. Overall, the toolkit shows promise but is still early-stage. We are excited to see it evolve to support more frameworks and use cases.

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🔖 Chapters:

00:00 Intro
01:10 What a modern frontend looks like (SPA vs SSR)
05:46 Overview of Vercel and its Developer Experience (DX)
08:57 Introducing the CloudFront Hosting Toolkit
09:01 Overview of CloudFront Toolkit features and architecture
13:48 How CloudFront functions and key-value store enable atomic immutable deployments
17:33 Walkthrough of using the toolkit with a sample Next.js app
26:22 Discussion of abstraction vs infrastructure control tradeoffs
28:15 Additional feedback on the toolkit based on experience
31:06 How Amplify compares to CloudFront Hosting Toolkit
32:41 Conclusion and request for feedback from listeners

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

- CloudFront Hosting Toolkit official announcement: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networki...
- Previous episode "80. Can you do private static websites on AWS?": https://awsbites.com/80-can-you-do-pr...
- Previous episode "3. How do you deploy a static website on AWS?": https://awsbites.com/3-how-do-you-dep...
- CloudFront functions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonClo...
- CloudFront Key-Value Store: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonClo...
- Sandro Volpicella's article on CloudFront Hosting Toolkit: https://blog.awsfundamentals.com/clou...
- Open Next: https://open-next.js.org/
- Coolify: https://coolify.io/

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