Josh Wieder

This weekend I spent some time migrating a few low-traffic websites from Nginx to AWS S3's static web hosting service. In theory, this is a straightforward process: move content from the old webroot to an S3 bucket that shares the name of the domain, enable static web hosting for the bucket & set a security policy that enables anonymous web users to see that content. In practice, there's a bit more involved: 1. S3 bucket resource paths can change, which will result in DNS failures unless you use a Route 53 hosted zone. You don't need to buy a domain from Amazon to do this, but you do need to use their nameservers. This isn't free, and there is an extra fee for DNSSEC. 2. Want an SSL/TLS certificate? Of course you do. This means generating a certificate within Amazon Certificate Manager. In most circumstances (without "legacy" client support for example), there is no charge for the certificate. But to serve traffic using that certificate requires provisioni

Amazon S3 subscribers recently received a form letter like this one: Dear AWS Customer, This message explains some security improvements in our services. Your security is important to us. Please review the entire message carefully to determine whether your use of the services will be affected, and if so what you need to do. As of 12:00 AM PDT May 20, 2015, AWS will discontinue support of SSLv3 for securing connections to S3 buckets. Security research published late last year demonstrated that SSLv3 contained weaknesses in its ability to protect and secure communications. These weaknesses have been addressed in Transport Layer Security (TLS), which is the replacement for SSL. Consistent with our top priority to protect AWS customers, AWS will only support versions of the more modern TLS rather than SSLv3. You are receiving this email because some of your users are accessing Amazon S3 using a browser configured to use SSLv3, or some of your existing applications that use Amazon S3 a

Dynamically uploading information to S3 can be a bit challenging to do initially, particularly in PHP where a lot of the documentation is either really new or really old. Amazon has a PHP SDK , which is available as either a .phar file or can be installed using Composer . That's cool for building a new project, but what if you have a pre-existing project or form and just want to be able to dump the text output to S3? I've put together some code at Github that will take care of that issue. The only requirement is PHP and an Amazon S3 account. Download or clone the files here:  https://github.com/jwieder/s3-http-php-form Your Amazon access keys and other configuration are stored in a single configuration file. Just fill out your login info into the configuration file and include the php form where you need it as outlined in the README.md file and you should be all set!