Deploying a static Astro site to AWS the boring way

There are a dozen ways to host a static site on AWS. Most of them are fine. The combination I keep coming back to is S3 + CloudFront, provisioned with CDK. I remeber using CDK a lot when I worked at AWS, it just simplifies things for myself. Someone might ask why not Terraform or another tool. I most use AWS services so I dont have the need for multi-cloud orcestration at the moment. Anyways the architecture costs roughly nothing at low traffic, terminates TLS at the edge, and you don’t have to think about it once it’s up.

The shape of it

Three moving parts:

1. A private S3 bucket holding the built static files.
2. A CloudFront distribution in front of the bucket, locked down with an Origin Access Control so the bucket never goes public.
3. A bucket deployment that uploads dist/ and invalidates the CDN cache.

That’s it. No Lambda, no API Gateway, no Amplify abstractions to debug.

Why not Amplify Hosting?

Amplify is a perfectly good managed service. The trade-off is opacity: when something misbehaves you’re chasing it through a console rather than reading your own CDK stack. For a blog, the explicit version is simpler in the long run.

Cost notes

At blog-scale traffic this lives comfortably in the AWS free tier and well below a few dollars a month after that. The two things to watch:

• CloudFront request pricing — negligible until you start serving real volume.
• Cache invalidations — the first 1,000 paths/month are free; if you invalidate /* on every deploy you’re using one path per deploy, so this is effectively a non-issue.

Custom domain in one extra step

Bring an ACM certificate in us-east-1 (CloudFront’s required region), point your Route 53 hosted zone at the distribution with an alias record, and you’re done. The CDK stack here takes both as optional context — set them when you’re ready.

It would be interesting to hear how others might approach a deployment. Feel free to drop a note.