Not Slide-ware: Hosting Your Node Project On AWS with Https

On May 18th 2020, I launched a start-up with a friend after quitting Amazon two days before. We have a company mission to create a positive impact to the local society, especially amid this difficult pandemic.

Personally, I also have the goal of going back to doing hands-on coding. The last 9 years of my 17 year professional life had been focused on management. I certainly learned a lot. I had helped many engineers and leaders develop their career. I had lead small and big teams to create many products.

And I had made a lot of slides! So now, I am back to hands-on software development. This is journey is anything but NOT “slide-ware!”.

So this is the first of the series to share what I learned along the way. In this post I will share my experience in hosting my node application on AWS with https using a combinations of AWS CloudFront and EC2. This will work even if you don’t own a custom domain of your own. In a follow-up post, I will also talk about how to host on ec2 with https using nginx without CloudFront. It’s likely these information is well known but I figure it is useful to share herejust in case it might save some time for someone.

Step 1 Create a node application and test on localhost