This project started after reading an article on the aws blog about serving redirect urls from an S3 bucket. The author even provided a CloudFormation template pretty sweet 😄.
Since I wanted to learn how to use CDK I decided to use this template and convert it to to a CDK project to do the same with some minor adjustments to suite my needs.
You are welcome to go to the project repository and have a gander.
If you just want to see the url shortener working navigate to the admin page and give it a go.
Note: Currently this is open for everyone and all links expire after 7 days. If it is abused it will be taken down.
A few things to note if you decide to run the project as is.
- If you have never used AWS CDK before start by going to CDK Workshop and following their guide.
- You need an AWS Account and update
cdk.jsonwith your account ID and all other relevant details.
Architecture and cost considerations
Using a full serverless application has several benefits: the application is natively multi-AZ and automatically scales whether you have one request per month or tens per second.
Now evaluate the cost of the URL Shortener for a simple scenario: You create 1000 short URLs per month and each is viewed by 1000 users – i.e., 1 million requests per month. Here is a cost estimate for the London region split by services:
- Lambda: 1000 invocation each of less than 1 second – less than $0.003 / month
- API Gateway: 1000 API calls – less than $0.004 / month
- S3: storage cost is negligible, cost for 1 million GET is $0.04 / month
- Amazon CloudFront: bandwidth cost is negligible, cost for 1 million GET is $0.075 / month
The overall cost is less than 12 cents per month, that’s pretty cheap.. 😉
Feedback
If you need to get in touch, you can find details at the bottom of this page. Alternatively, you can comment here or at the project page on GitHub.