Ship a portfolio website in 10 minutes or less
A portfolio website hosted on AWS tells people two things about you: it tells them about your projects, and it also tells them that you know how to ship apps to the cloud. Here's how to set up your own portfolio site on AWS in 10 minutes, less time than it takes for your coffee to get cold. ☕️
Last updated: April 29, 2026
What you're building
By the end of this post, you'll have:
- A live portfolio website with a public URL
- Free HTTPS with no extra setup
- Your site delivered through a content delivery network (CDN), so it loads fast for visitors
Why Amplify?
You could host a static site (a website made of plain HTML, CSS, and images — no server-side code running behind it) on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) directly, or set up Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 yourself. Amplify wraps all of that into one service, which is nice when you want to get your website online fast. Here's what you get out of the box, without configuring anything:
- HTTPS by default, with a free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate
- A global CDN through CloudFront, so your site loads faster everywhere, not just near one data center
- Git-based continuous deployment if you connect a repo later — meaning every time you push code to your repository, your site updates automatically
And Amplify is part of the AWS Free Tier . New accounts get up to $200 in credits that apply to Amplify and other AWS services.
What you'll need
- An AWS Free Tier account — check out this guide if you haven’t set one up yet!
- An administrative IAM (Identity and Access Management) user — the guide linked in the previous bullet shows how to set this up as well.
Ask your Kiro CLI (or another agentic coding tool) to create a new folder on your computer called my-portfolio, and to build out a simple portfolio page in an
index.html file.
Here is an example of what you might get for your
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<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Your Name - Developer Portfolio</title>
<style>
body {
font-family: system-ui, sans-serif;
max-width: 600px;
margin: 4rem auto;
padding: 0 1rem;
line-height: 1.6;
}
h1 { margin-bottom: 0.25rem; }
.subtitle { color: #666; margin-top: 0; }
a { color: #0073bb; }
footer { margin-top: 3rem; color: #999; font-size: 0.85rem; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hi, I'm [Your Name]</h1>
<p class="subtitle">Developer & builder of things</p>
<p>Welcome to my corner of the internet. I'm currently building projects with AWS.</p>
<h2>Projects</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>This website</strong> - deployed on AWS Amplify (you're looking at it)</li>
</ul>
<h2>Find me</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/yourusername">GitHub</a></li>
<li><a href="https://linkedin.com/in/yourusername">LinkedIn</a></li>
</ul>
<footer>© 2026 Made with ♥ by [Your Name]</footer>
</body>
</html>That's plenty to start with. You can make it fancier later (and you will, once it's live and you start showing people).
Step 1: Zip your site file(s)
Select all the files inside your
my-portfolio folder and compress them into a .zip file. You can do this manually or ask Kiro CLI to help you.One small gotcha: be sure to zip the contents of the folder, not the folder itself. If your files are in a folder called
my-portfolio, open that folder, select everything inside it, and zip those files. If you zip the outer folder, Amplify won't find your index.html at the root and you'll get an "Access Denied" error.To do this manually on macOS, select the files and right-click > Compress. On Windows, select the files, right-click > Send to > Compressed folder.
Step 2: Open AWS Amplify
Sign into the AWS Management console and navigate to the Amplify console. Choose Deploy an app.
Step 3: Deploy without Git
Here, you have two options: connect a Git repository (a place where your code is stored and version-tracked, like GitHub), or deploy without one. Since we're going for speed today, select Deploy without Git, then choose Next.
If you already have your site in a GitHub repo and want continuous deployment (every push updates your site automatically), you can connect GitHub instead. That's a great setup for ongoing work, but it adds a few more steps. We'll keep it simple for now.
Step 4: Upload and deploy
- Give your app a name (like "my-portfolio")
- For branch name, type "main"
- For method, choose Drag and drop
- Drag your
.zipfile onto the drop zone (or click to browse for it) - Click Save and deploy
That's it. Amplify will unpack your files, set up hosting, configure SSL, and put your site on a CDN. This usually takes under two minutes. Good time to sip that coffee. ☕️
Step 5: Visit your site
Once the deployment finishes, you'll see a green checkmark and a link that looks like
https://main.d1234abcd.amplifyapp.com. Click it.
Woohoo! 🎉 Your portfolio is live on the internet, with HTTPS. Send that link to someone. Put it on your resume or post it on LinkedIn.
What happened behind the scenes
Amplify did a few things for you when you hit deploy:
- Your files are stored on Amazon S3 behind-the-scenes. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is where your HTML file (and any other static site assets) actually live. Think of it like a hard drive in the cloud: your files sit there, and when someone visits your site, S3 serves them up. You didn't have to create a bucket or set permissions because Amplify did that for you.
- Your site is delivered through Amazon CloudFront, a CDN . CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Say you're shipping products from a warehouse in Seattle. Your first customer in Tokyo places an order, and the package ships directly across the Pacific. Takes a while. But once it arrives, a local fulfillment center in Tokyo stocks that product so the next customer in the area gets it much faster. CloudFront works the same way. Your files live in one place (S3), but CloudFront has servers called "edge locations" spread across the world. The first visitor from a new region triggers a fetch from the origin, and CloudFront caches a copy at the nearest edge location. After that, everyone nearby loads your site from the local copy.
- Your site uses HTTPS by default, with a free SSL certificate . You've probably noticed that most URLs start with
https://. That "s" stands for "secure." When your site uses HTTPS, the connection between your visitor's browser and your site is encrypted. Think of it like sending a letter in a sealed envelope instead of on a postcard. Nobody in between can read or tamper with the data. The SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security) certificate is what makes this work. It's a small file that proves your site is who it says it is and enables that encrypted connection.
What this costs
The cost for deploying your static portfolio site with Amplify depends on the site’s storage and bandwidth consumption. For a small static site that gets light traffic, this will likely be under $1 per month. In us-east-1, this is billed at $0.023 per GB build artifacts stored (I used 0.001 GigaBytes in the past month) and $0.15 per GB served in data transfer out (I used 0.001 GigaBytes in the past month). This usage amounted to USD 0.00 on my bill under Amplify in March. If your site uses more storage or bandwidth, any charges will come out of your Free Tier credits while you’re on the Free plan.
If you’re signed in as your root user, you can check your bill summary here . You can also learn more about Amplify pricing here .
Next steps
Your site is live, but there's more you can do:
Connect a GitHub repo. Instead of drag-and-drop, connect your site's GitHub repository to Amplify. Every time you push a change, Amplify rebuilds and redeploys automatically. This is the setup you'll want for ongoing development.
Make it a real portfolio. Add project screenshots, link to your GitHub repos, write about what you learned building each project. Add a design that showcases your personality. The best portfolio sites show how you think and who you are, not just what you coded.
Keep building on AWS. Now that you have an account and a live site, you've got a foundation to build on. Try this project next, where you build a serverless backend application.
This project is part of the AWS Free Tier onboarding series. Everything you built here runs within the Free Tier — no surprise bills, just learning.
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