A number of our portfolio sites (including http://piaustralia.com.au ) are static html hosted on AWS S3 + Cloudfront.
The sites are created using Middleman[1], a ruby static site generator which I've found to be a little bit more flexible than Jekyll.
On our static sites, we grab inventory information as JSONP from a small Sinatra based service on Elastic Beanstalk with read only access to the DB. Other than this and the checkout (we'll get to that in a bit), everything is client side Javascript utilising local storage for the cart state.
We do not host our own checkout. Instead we use Shopify's ancient and way under-publicised "Cart Links"[2] feature. Cart Links let you pre-populate a cart and send the user to the checkout if you so wish.
To upload the static files to S3 we use an awesome program called S3_website which knows how to look for the rendered html from a number of static site generators, and sync it to S3. It's also smart enough to setup redirects, invalidate CDN caches and even gzipping content. It's freaking amazing[3].
The sites are created using Middleman[1], a ruby static site generator which I've found to be a little bit more flexible than Jekyll.
On our static sites, we grab inventory information as JSONP from a small Sinatra based service on Elastic Beanstalk with read only access to the DB. Other than this and the checkout (we'll get to that in a bit), everything is client side Javascript utilising local storage for the cart state.
We do not host our own checkout. Instead we use Shopify's ancient and way under-publicised "Cart Links"[2] feature. Cart Links let you pre-populate a cart and send the user to the checkout if you so wish.
To upload the static files to S3 we use an awesome program called S3_website which knows how to look for the rendered html from a number of static site generators, and sync it to S3. It's also smart enough to setup redirects, invalidate CDN caches and even gzipping content. It's freaking amazing[3].
[1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com
[2] Shopify Cart Links - https://help.shopify.com/themes/customization/cart/use-perma...
[3] S3_website - https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website