Announcing Cloud 66 Prepress

Today we are releasing a completely new product: Cloud 66 Prepress.

Prepress is a DevOps product for pre-rendered web applications — particularly those built around Jamstack architecture.

We announced Cloud 66 for Rails in 2013. Our Rails product helps developers deploy Rails applications to any cloud with a Heroku-like experience.

Today, tens of thousands of developers worldwide use our products to deploy their applications to any cloud.

Cloud 66 Prepress does the same thing, but for static site builders. So if you have a website, blog, or shop built with Jekyll, Gatsby, or Hugo, you can use Prepress to deploy it to your AWS account.

Let’s jump into the details!

Without Prepress, to host a static site built with Jekyll or Gatsby, you need to do the following:

1. Build the static assets by running the tool.
2. Create an AWS S3 or similar object store and upload those files to it.
3. Configure the storage and the files for public (or private) access.
4. Setup conventions like redirecting / to /index.html on the storage.
5. Configure a CDN like Cloudfront to point to your site if you need SSL (HTTPS) support.

With every iteration of your site, you’d then need to upload the files, set the access rights and invalidate the CDN caches.

Prepress takes care of all of this, and much more, for you in 3 steps:

1. Connect your git repo
2. Connect your AWS account
3. Press Go!

Today’s release is our first step towards making hosting static sites developer-friendly, but we are far from done. We have a packed calendar of Prepress feature releases including supporting more cloud providers, more frameworks, and adding many of the other DevOps features static sites require.

Originally published at https://blog.cloud66.com on September 28, 2021.