A note on dates: this post was written in 2020 using Terraform 0.12 and the nodejs12.x Lambda runtime. The architecture still holds up well, but if you’re following along today, check the current AWS provider docs and use a supported Lambda runtime and Terraform version. In particular, the aws_s3_bucket resource has since been split into smaller resources (aws_s3_bucket_acl, aws_s3_bucket_logging, aws_s3_bucket_website_configuration and so on).

Recently I had the chance to create a static website using S3 and CloudFront. I used Hugo as the framework for content management and Terraform to provision the infrastructure. There were a few interesting challenges, but in the end it worked out well.