Speeding up a medical university's website infrastructure with Terraform + CloudFront

What changed

• Configuration management
  Codified as IaC with Terraform
• Cache delivery
  Sped up with CloudFront + ACM
• Environments
  staging / production separated

Challenge

Premised on long-term operation, the medical university's website needed higher reproducibility for configuration changes and recovery procedures. At the same time, page speed for visitors was an issue — latency was noticeable, especially on content-heavy pages. Within the cost constraints of an educational institution, we needed to deliver both "reproducible configuration management" and "cache-based speedup" at the same time.

Approach

1. 01 Inventoried the existing website configuration and identified the scope to codify as IaC with Terraform
2. 02 Managed AWS resources in Terraform on a per-module basis
3. 03 Introduced CloudFront + ACM to centralize content-delivery caching and SSL termination
4. 04 Configured staging and production from the same Terraform code, eliminating inconsistencies at production rollout
5. 05 Designed the cache strategy (per-path TTL, cache keys) to match the content's characteristics

Key success factors

Removing person-dependency through IaC

We codified the configuration with Terraform, ensuring change history and reproducibility.

Cache speedup with CloudFront

We improved page speed for visitors through cache delivery of content.

Identical configuration management across environments

We managed staging and production with the same Terraform code, lowering the risk of inconsistency at production rollout.

Centralized SSL-certificate management

We automated certificate renewal and application with ACM, structurally holding down operational load.

Solution

We codified the AWS infrastructure with Terraform and managed staging and production from the same codebase. We introduced CloudFront + ACM to centralize SSL-certificate management while structurally improving the site's page speed. We built a reproducible, fast delivery foundation that holds up under an educational institution's long-term operation.