AWS Cloud Solutions

I built and deployed this portfolio website to showcase my projects and experience as a data analyst and cloud enthusiast. The site is powered by Hugo (a fast static site generator) and hosted entirely on AWS. It features a professional contact form, clean layout, dark/light theme support, and fully automated deployment. 🚀 What I Did 🏗️ Site Setup with Hugo Used the PaperMod theme for a clean and responsive design Created pages for blog posts, project case studies, and an about page Customized the config file for metadata, theme options, and menu items 🌐 AWS Hosting S3 Buckets: www.brianmwaura.com (main bucket with website files) brianmwaura.com (redirect bucket) brians-portfolio-site (legacy/test bucket) Route 53: Managed domain registration and DNS records CloudFront: Delivered content globally with HTTPS (SSL via ACM) Handled root redirects and caching 🔁 GitHub Actions for CI/CD Set up GitHub repo: Bnjenga1/hugo-portfolio Created a workflow to: Build site with Hugo Upload public/ directory to S3 Invalidate CloudFront cache 📬 Contact Page + Email Built a custom contact form using Formspree with JavaScript for UX improvements Set up a professional email alias info@brianmwaura.com via Google Workspace Ensured form styling adapts to both light and dark themes 📊 SEO, Analytics & Monitoring Connected the site to Google Analytics 4 Submitted sitemap.xml to Google Search Console Added Open Graph and meta tags for better sharing and visibility 🧰 Tools & Services Used Static Generator: Hugo Hosting: AWS S3 + CloudFront CI/CD: GitHub Actions Domain Management: Route 53 Email: Google Workspace + Formspree Analytics: GA4 + Search Console 💡 Key Takeaways Learned to configure static hosting and CDN on AWS Set up secure and scalable infrastructure for a real-world personal project Practiced debugging Hugo layouts and customizing themes Automated deployments and version control with GitHub Improved UX with clean forms, responsive design, and reliable email contact 🔗 Live Demo 👉 www.brianmwaura.com ...

This project documents how I hosted a WordPress blog on an AWS EC2 instance using the free tier. I manually set up Apache, PHP, MariaDB, and WordPress on an Amazon Linux 2023 instance. ✅ Tools Used AWS EC2 (Amazon Linux 2023) PuTTY (SSH client) WordPress Apache, PHP, MariaDB 🔧 1. Launch EC2 Instance Chose Amazon Linux 2023 Instance type: t2.micro Set key pair (used later for SSH) Placed EC2 in a public subnet with auto-assigned public IP Security group rules: -Allow SSH (port 22) from your IP -Allow HTTP (port 80) from anywhere 🔑 2. SSH into EC2 Instance Using PuTTY: ...

📝 Project Overview In this project, I deployed a fully functional static website using Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). This task introduced me to cloud-based storage, object permissions, and static site hosting—core skills for cloud computing and web deployment. 🎯 Objectives Learn how to create and configure an S3 bucket Upload and serve static content (HTML, CSS) Set object-level permissions for public access Enable static website hosting on S3 🛠️ Tools & Technologies ...