Mount Kenya University · Thika Campus

The Global Path.
How one request
crosses the world.

A hands-on session on Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront — the DNS and content-delivery layer that makes AWS applications fast, reliable, and reachable from anywhere. Led by Allan Kariuki, AWS Community Builder.

Date%EVENT_DATE%
Time%EVENT_TIME%
Venue%VENUE%
You are looking at the demo

This exact page is Workshop 1

What's rendering in your browser right now is a static site sitting in an S3 bucket, distributed globally through CloudFront, and reachable through a friendly name via Route 53. No servers. No containers. Just objects and edges.

S3 Bucket%S3_BUCKET_NAME%
CloudFront Domain%CLOUDFRONT_DOMAIN%
Custom Domain (Route 53)%CUSTOM_DOMAIN%

What you'll learn

From a click to a rendered page

Global Networking

How AWS spans the planet

Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations — the physical backbone every other service sits on.

Route 53

DNS, done the AWS way

Hosted zones, record types, routing policies, and health checks that decide where traffic goes.

CloudFront

Speed through proximity

Caching, edge locations, origins, and how CloudFront shaves hundreds of milliseconds off every request.

Working Together

R53 + CloudFront, paired

Alias records, custom domains, and TLS — connecting a human-friendly name to a global distribution.

Architecture

Static vs. dynamic origins

Same front door, two different back rooms: an S3 bucket versus an Application Load Balancer.

Best Practices

Fast, scalable, secure

Cache invalidation, least-privilege bucket policies, and sane TTLs for production workloads.

Agenda · 5 hours

How the session runs

  1. 00:00–00:15Welcome & Registration
  2. 00:15–00:45AWS Global Networking Overview
  3. 00:45–01:15Deep Dive: Route 53
  4. 01:15–01:45Deep Dive: CloudFront
  5. 01:45–02:00Break
  6. 02:00–03:00Workshop 1 — Static Hosting (S3 + Route 53 + CloudFront)
  7. 03:00–03:15Break
  8. 03:15–04:15Workshop 2 — Dynamic Hosting (ALB + Route 53 + CloudFront)
  9. 04:15–04:45Kahoot Trivia
  10. 04:45–05:00Q&A, Community Updates & Wrap-up

Two labs, one front door

Static vs. dynamic hosting

Workshop 1

Static hosting

Host a plain HTML/CSS site in an S3 bucket, distribute it worldwide with CloudFront, and point a real domain at it using Route 53. This is exactly what's running on the page you're reading.

Lab guide →
Workshop 2

Dynamic hosting

Swap the origin: an Application Load Balancer fronting live compute, still delivered through CloudFront and still resolved through Route 53. Same edge, a very different back room.

Lab guide →

Come prepared

What to bring