Keepin’ It on Lockdown: How We Use Amazon Web Services to Secure Websites

Highly Available

Every website on our platform is fed by one of two servers that live in their own availability zone (for example, one availability zone may be in Ohio and another in Virginia), also known as a datacenter. These servers sit behind something called load balancers, which also live in multiple availability zones. This means that even if one of the datacenters is crushed by a hobbled alien spacecraft, our sites will continue to be served up to a panicking population, with little to no downtime.

Amazon also gives us the ability to change the region of the servers. So, should something catastrophic happen in one region—say, the crash-landing of a damaged or disabled alien spacecraft(s)—the sites we host will remain online and uninterrupted. There’s no question, keeping websites up and running is something we take pretty seriously.

Blazingly Fast

Using another AWS tool called Auto Scaling Groups, our hosting platform can automatically add additional servers behind the load balancers to accommodate any additional traffic demand when sites become more popular. Those additional servers give extra lung capacity, if you will, allowing content to continue being served quickly, while still serving content for other sites on the platform.

If a company’s website traffic drops, say, due to public disgust about its nefarious ties to a malevolent alien race, Auto Scaling Group dials back servers that are no longer needed.

Impressively Secure

Each site hosted on the platform is assigned its own user account. This account can only access the files and folders assigned to it. The web server software for each site runs as that individual user, so the web server for one site can't read or write files for another—even with known alien decryption methods. In the incredibly unlikely event that an attacker infiltrates these defenses, they'll only be able to compromise one site, leaving all others unharmed.

We use AWS's tool Security Groups to make sure our servers can only talk to servers we've specified. A rogue attacker wouldn't be able to see much else on the network if they managed to gain access. We've designed this in such a way to make the lives of potential attackers—human or non-human—as difficult as we can.

The servers, besides web traffic, are actually inaccessible by the internet at large because they all live inside a security fortress. The gatekeeper of that fortress only allows people in that know the secret word, and we keep that list of people short, so there's only a select group who can make changes when necessary. For what it’s worth, none of the gatekeepers have any ties to aliens.