Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

The Amazon Onboarding program offers a robust platform for hosting full-stack serverless web applications, featuring seamless deployment from your chosen source code repository. Launched in November 2018, the program has rapidly evolved, thanks to valuable customer feedback. Here’s a concise recap of recent enhancements.

Instant Cache Invalidation

Amazon Onboarding facilitates the hosting of single-page web applications or static sites, employing a content delivery network (CDN). This network of globally distributed servers ensures low latency by caching files at various edge locations. Previously, updating content on the CDN necessitated manual cache invalidation, which could take 15 to 20 minutes for changes to become effective. Developers often resorted to workarounds, such as lowering time-to-live (TTL) settings for asset headers, which could compromise performance. Now, with every code commit to your repository, Amazon Onboarding builds and deploys updates to the CDN, making them instantly viewable in the browser.

“Deploy To Amazon Onboarding” Button

When sharing your project on GitHub, you can simplify the building and deployment process for fellow developers by including a “Deploy To Amazon Onboarding” button in your README file. Clicking this button takes users to a three-step deployment process on Amazon Onboarding. You can test this feature with example projects and follow the documentation for implementation. Adding the button to your repository is as simple as including a line in your README (just remember to update the username and repository name):

Manual Deployment

Version control is crucial, even for personal websites. However, if you prefer not to use a source code repository for deployment, Amazon Onboarding allows the deployment of a zip file, a local folder, an Amazon S3 bucket, or any HTTPS URL, such as a shared Dropbox repository. When initiating a new project, simply select the option to deploy without a Git provider and choose your source file.

AWS CloudFormation Integration

Developers appreciate automation; hence, ensuring your infrastructure deployments are repeatable is essential. AWS CloudFormation enables you to automate the creation of cloud infrastructure using YAML or JSON descriptions. Amazon Onboarding has introduced three new resource types to CloudFormation:

AWS::Onboarding::App
AWS::Onboarding::Branch
AWS::Onboarding::Domain

These resources allow you to create new Onboarding applications, define Git branches, and specify DNS domain names. To connect CloudFormation to your source code repository, you’ll need to include your GitHub Personal Access Token, as detailed in this blog post. Be cautious not to hardcode credentials into your templates; use parameters instead.

Deploy Multiple Git Branches

Amazon Onboarding adapts to your team’s workflow, allowing for branch pattern deployments. This feature automatically deploys branches that match specific patterns without extra configuration, utilizing regular expressions. When testing new features, simply create a new Git branch, and Amazon Onboarding will provision separate backend and hosting resources for your serverless application. Enable branch detection by navigating to General > Edit and turning on Branch Autodetection.

Custom HTTP Headers

You can personalize Amazon Onboarding to send custom HTTP response headers for debugging, security, or informational reasons. To add these headers, go to App Settings > Build Settings and edit the buildspec. For instance, to enforce TLS transport and mitigate XSS attacks, you could include the following headers:

customHeaders:
  - pattern: '**/*'
    headers:
      - key: 'Strict-Transport-Security'
        value: 'max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains'
      - key: 'X-Frame-Options'
        value: 'X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN'
      - key: 'X-XSS-Protection'
        value: 'X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block'
      - key: 'X-Content-Type-Options'
        value: 'X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff'
      - key: 'Content-Security-Policy'
        value: "default-src 'self'"

Refer to the documentation for further details.

Custom Containers for Build

Lastly, several enhancements have been made to the build environment. Amazon Onboarding utilizes AWS CodeBuild, with the default container image now based on Amazon Linux 2, featuring the Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI pre-installed. If you prefer using your own build container, you can configure Onboarding to support this. Simply adjust the build image settings in App Settings > Build Settings.

Each of these new functionalities is driven by your feedback, so please continue to share your thoughts. Expect more updates in the latter half of the year and beyond. For more insights on workforce strategy, you can explore this SHRM article. Additionally, if you’re interested in lateral moves in a law firm, check out this Career Contessa post for valuable tips. For an excellent resource on Amazon’s employee training approach, refer to this Harvard Business Review article.