Cloud – Michael Clayton

Deploying to the cloud can often feel like juggling dozens of moving parts—manually clicking through the AWS console, hoping you didn’t miss a security checkbox, and praying that your staging environment matches your production.

That is why I moved my entire infrastructure to Terraform. By treating my infrastructure as code, I’ve turned a manual, error-prone process into a repeatable, automated, and—most importantly—understandable workflow.

In this post, I want to share how I’ve architected my booking application on AWS using Terraform.

The Architecture: A “Reverse Proxy” Approach

My goal was simple: create a fast, secure, and modern booking application. To achieve this, I use a combination of serverless technologies and a powerful CDN.

1. The Frontend: Amazon S3 & CloudFront

My website assets—the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—live in an Amazon S3 bucket. However, I don’t serve them directly from S3. Instead, I use Amazon CloudFront, a global Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The Connection: In my frontend.tf, I define the aws_cloudfront_distribution resource. This connects to my S3 bucket via Origin Access Control (OAC), ensuring that only CloudFront can read my bucket files. This effectively makes the site globally fast while keeping my raw files private.

2. The Backend: API Gateway & Lambda

For the heavy lifting—like handling form submissions and managing bookings—I use Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda.

The Connection: My api_gateway.tf file defines the endpoints (like /booking or /submit). It links these paths directly to my Lambda functions, which contain the business logic. Because it’s serverless, I don’t pay for idle servers—I only pay when a user actually interacts with my site.

3. The “Traffic Cop”: CloudFront Reverse Proxy

The secret sauce of this project is using CloudFront as a Reverse Proxy. Rather than forcing my frontend to make cross-domain API calls (which causes those annoying CORS headaches), I route both my frontend and my API through the same CloudFront domain.

The Connection: In my reverse_proxy.tf, I set up ordered_cache_behavior blocks. These blocks look at the URL path (e.g., /booking* or /submit*) and intelligently route that request to my API Gateway instead of S3.
Why it matters: Because the browser sees everything as coming from one domain, the “same-origin” policy kicks in. CORS errors disappear, and the architecture becomes much more secure by hiding the raw API Gateway URL from the public.

Why Terraform is a Game-Changer

Writing this in Terraform means I have a “Single Source of Truth.” If I need to update my API Gateway stage or change how my site routes traffic, I don’t go hunting through the AWS console. I simply update my .tf files and run terraform apply.

Some of the key wins for me have been:

Consistency: My sandbox environment is a perfect mirror of what I’ll eventually deploy to production.
Transparency: I can share my configuration with others, and they can see exactly how the api-gateway-policy in reverse_proxy.tf is constructed to handle headers.
Automation: I’ve even configured Terraform to dynamically inject my API URL into a config.js file at deployment time, so my frontend always knows exactly where to find the backend.

Final Thoughts

Moving to Infrastructure as Code hasn’t just made my deployments faster; it’s made them smarter. By leveraging CloudFront as a reverse proxy, I’ve cleaned up my frontend code, eliminated CORS issues, and built a foundation that can scale.

If you’re still clicking buttons in the AWS console, I highly recommend giving Terraform a try. Your future self—and your deployment logs—will thank you!

Happy coding, and see you in the cloud!

Cloud Computing is slowly establishing itself as the backbone of large corporations, startup companies and independents all alike. The timeline of online technology as it descended into the dotcom bomb and arose from the ashes like a phoenix is a classic store of nothing to something.

In the beginning there was the Internet with new websites popping up daily. Can you recall all the early ‘Social Media’ sites, like ubo.net? It had everything I wanted but at the same time nothing. There were links to things I knew people like me were interested; the local event, restaurants, music, etc… The problem with these companies is that there was no true value in their web presence. Think about having a staff of information technology specialists, marketing department and the whole nine yards, but you have no true stream of revenue. That is what many companies faced in the mid to late 90s. No bottom line, hence, the dotcom bomb destroyed companies these companies.

Fast-forward to 2010 and businesses have a better understanding of technology and how it does more than act as a showpiece. In the financial services industry we have Cloud Computing serving as virtual work staff. Salesforce.com, one of, if not the largest, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform and has grown to over a billion dollars in assets in less than 10 years reaching into all facets of business like Lead Management for E-Trade Financial and global collaboration with business partners for Dell Computers. Cloud Computing allows smaller entities to live a better existence in their industry with Cloud based services. The cost of Cloud based services is dwarfed when compared to keeping an in house staff of information technology professionals. This is news golden for startups and independents.