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AWS Solutions Library

Guidance for Moving Your Paywall to the Edge on AWS

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How it works

These technical details feature an architecture diagram to illustrate how to effectively use this solution. The architecture diagram shows the key components and their interactions, providing an overview of the architecture's structure and functionality step-by-step.

Download the architecture diagram

Well-Architected Pillars

The architecture diagram above is an example of a Solution created with Well-Architected best practices in mind. To be fully Well-Architected, you should follow as many Well-Architected best practices as possible.

API Gateway , CloudFront , DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , and Lambda are services purpose-built to enhance your operational excellence framework when deploying this Guidance. These services allow for publishing new versions and configurations through an automated pipeline, such as AWS CloudFormation . These services also provide Amazon CloudWatch metrics, or can be configured to send events to CloudWatch logs, which can be used to monitor individual components of the Guidance.

Read the Operational Excellence whitepaper 

Cognito and API Gateway are two services deployed in this Guidance to enhance the security of your workloads. Cognito provides an authentication framework that issues digitally signed JSON Web Tokens (JWTs ). API Gateway can be configured to require an API key. Cognito provides a secure, tamperproof mechanism for listing user subscriptions in a JWT, which can then be used to authorize requests for content. A Lambda@Edge function uses the JWT on each request and sets a request header showing that the request has been authorized. By configuring the API Gateway to require an API key, you can ensure that the authorization header was set by your own CloudFront distribution.

Read the Security whitepaper 

Lambda , DynamoDB , Amazon S3 , Cognito , API Gateway , CloudFront , and Lambda@Edge are highly available at a Regional or global level. Each AWS Region is fully isolated and consists of multiple Availability Zones, which are also isolated in the infrastructure. This helps you deploy this Guidance with high resiliency and protect your workloads from issues such as outages and failures.  

Read the Reliability whitepaper 

CloudFront and Lambda@Edge can enhance the performance efficiency of your workloads, as they both handle requests at the network edge. This reduces network latency, helping you deliver content as quickly as possible. 

Read the Performance Efficiency whitepaper 

Lambda and Lambda@Edge are serverless architectures that run and scale on demand, helping to ensure that your workloads are able to continually match the demand with only the minimum resources required. By using these services, you do not pay for compute instances that are not being used. 

Read the Cost Optimization whitepaper 

Lambda , API Gateway , Cognito , and DynamoDB are serverless architectures, which means these services minimize resource consumption, scale on demand, and include patterns for maintaining consistent high utilization of deployed resources. This helps to ensure you meet the needs of your present workloads without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.  

Read the Sustainability whitepaper 

Deploy with confidence

Dive deep into the implementation guide for additional customization options and service configurations to tailor to your specific needs.

Open implementation guide

Disclaimer

The sample code; software libraries; command line tools; proofs of concept; templates; or other related technology (including any of the foregoing that are provided by our personnel) is provided to you as AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement, or the relevant written agreement between you and AWS (whichever applies). You should not use this AWS Content in your production accounts, or on production or other critical data. You are responsible for testing, securing, and optimizing the AWS Content, such as sample code, as appropriate for production grade use based on your specific quality control practices and standards. Deploying AWS Content may incur AWS charges for creating or using AWS chargeable resources, such as running Amazon EC2 instances or using Amazon S3 storage.