Can I really run production infrastructure for free on AWS?

Not indefinitely, but the free tier covers a lot more than people realize. Lambda has 1 million free requests per month. S3 is free for the first 12 months (50 GB storage). CloudFront has a free tier too. Where you pay is after you exceed those limits *or* when you use paid services like Route 53 unnecessarily. This setup avoids unnecessary paid services.

What happens when traffic grows and I exceed free tier limits?

Then you pay—but you'll know exactly which services are costing you what. You won't have architectural debt from choosing an expensive service early. You can optimize before costs spiral. That's the real win.

Is this setup only for side projects?

No. The architecture pattern—separated storage, compute, and CDN—scales to millions of requests. The only change is cost optimization, not architectural rework. This is how production systems are built. You're just running it cheaper.

🏗️ DevOps & Infrastructure

How One Developer Built a Production Site for ₹0: The AWS-Cloudflare Blueprint That Actually Works

A developer built a full production infrastructure—with HTTPS, custom domain, and scalable compute—for exactly ₹0. Here's the architecture that worked, and the gotchas that almost broke it.

Open Source Beat Apr 03, 2026 4 min read 17 views

Architecture diagram showing Cloudflare DNS routing to CloudFront CDN and API Gateway, with S3 bucket locked behind Origin Access Control

⚡ Key Takeaways

Separate concerns: use distinct services for DNS (Cloudflare), compute (Lambda), storage (S3), and CDN (CloudFront) instead of bundling them into one expensive platform 𝕏
CloudFront requires SSL certificates in us-east-1 regardless of where your actual infrastructure runs—a regional quirk that will trap you if you don't know it 𝕏
Disable Cloudflare's proxy mode (use DNS-only) when pointing to AWS services that already handle their own SSL, or you'll get handshake failures 𝕏
Understanding zero-cost architecture teaches you how production systems actually work—DNS resolution, SSL termination, CDN behavior—in ways managed platforms won't 𝕏

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#AWS free tier #CloudFront S3 #Cloudflare DNS #SSL certificates #production deployment #zero-cost infrastructure

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Originally reported by Dev.to

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