Shipping a static site the AWS way
Walking through this very site: S3, CloudFront, OAC, ACM, Cloudflare DNS. Why each piece exists and the gotchas I hit.
Building Cloud,
hands on
IT Support engineer pivoting into Cloud & DevOps. I learn by deploying the real thing, including this site, which is served to you from an AWS edge right now.
Live
edge → resolving…
ttfb → … ms
via CloudFront
01 · About
From the help desk to production.
I started in IT Support solving people's problems one ticket at a time. Now I want to solve them at the infrastructure layer, the layer that keeps tickets from being filed in the first place.
What I'm doing right now
Putting AWS Solutions Architect Associate into practice on small, production style projects. This portfolio is one of them: a private S3 bucket behind CloudFront, an ACM issued cert, OAC instead of a public bucket policy, DNS through Cloudflare.
Next up: getting the same comfort with Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Linux on EC2 so I can own the whole pipeline end to end.
The journey
Before IT
CompTIA A+
Formalised the fundamentals before stepping into the field. Picked up Linux on the side.
IT job
Started in IT Support
Help desk, hardware, Windows / macOS / network triage.
May 2026
AWS Solutions Architect Associate
VPC, IAM, S3, EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, DNS, top to bottom.
Now
Pivoting into Cloud / DevOps
Building this site, scripting in bash + Python, picking up Terraform & CI/CD.
02 · How this site works
The page you're reading, traced live.
Click a node. Every box is something I configured by hand. The dotted arrows are the path your browser took to reach this paragraph.
CloudFront Edge
Global CDN sitting in front of S3. Caches the site at AWS edge locations, terminates TLS using the ACM cert, and enforces HTTPS only. Without this layer, S3 would be slower, costlier, and exposed.
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id E... --paths "/*"
03 · Lab notes
What I'm building & writing about next.
A live look at the bench. Some of these are notebooks I'm cleaning up into proper write ups. The rest are projects in flight.
Terraforming what I clicked together
Re-deploying this same stack as Terraform modules. Goal: nuke the AWS console and have one terraform apply rebuild it from zero.
GitHub Actions → S3, no long lived keys
Wiring a deploy pipeline that uses OIDC instead of an IAM access key. CI assumes a role, syncs the bucket, invalidates CloudFront.
Reading CloudWatch like a sysadmin
What I'd actually look at when something breaks. Mapping the help desk troubleshooting muscle onto AWS observability.
VPC by hand, the slow way
Building a VPC, subnets, route tables, and a NAT gateway without copying a template. Aimed at folks who passed SAA-C03 and still feel fuzzy.
IT Support → Cloud: what carried over
An honest list of the help desk skills that translate directly to infra work, and the gaps I had to fill. For other people making the same jump.
Full posts ship at seba.sh/blog when each draft clears review. Subscribe via RSS or ping me on LinkedIn to get notified.
04 · Edge map
Where this page lives.
The site sits in S3 once and is replicated to ~600 CloudFront edges. The green dot is the one currently serving you.
05 · Contact
Looking for a Cloud / DevOps junior who already ships?
I'm actively interviewing for entry level Cloud, infrastructure, and DevOps roles. I bring a help desk troubleshooter's instinct and a habit of putting everything I learn into production.