VOD cloudfront solution

Regarding your question: "Do I need to use all the services in this solution, in order to post a dozen videos, to start, and perhaps one or two per month after...."

The short answer is No. You can serve videos from a private S3 bucket with a public-facing CloudFront CDN caching distribution between that bucket and the viewers. This should take less than 10 minutes to configure from your AWS Console. Authentication is optional but strongly recommended. Start simple, with one test asset in your S3 bucket, plus a simple CF distribution. Then build on success by adding complexity in stages.

Answering your questions:

1. Do I need to use all the services in this solution, in order to post a dozen videos, to start, and perhaps one or two per month after

-> No, you do not need to use all the services mentioned in the VOD solution here[1]. You can use simple solution such as your video content would be stored on a server and viewers can watch it at any time. To make an asset that viewers can stream, use an encoder, such as AWS Elemental MediaConvert, to format and package your media files. After your video is packaged into the right formats, you can store it on a server or in an Amazon S3 bucket, and then deliver it with CloudFront as viewers request it.

For more details, Please check the below link : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/on-demand-video.html

Additionally, please find the below link for Serverless Architecture where you can automatically deploy using the each solution's implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.

[+] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/video-on-demand-on-aws/

[+] Github link : https://github.com/aws-solutions/video-on-demand-on-aws

You can deploy these above mentioned solution by launching it in your AWS Console option in "Deployment options".

2. how do I connect Cognito to Appsync to first S3, to a Lambda that sends it to the 3 services: DynamoDB, secrets manager, and elemental media convert to the output bucket along with the signed urls for Cloudfront.

-> The solution which you are referring to is for "secure video-on-demand (VOD) platform using AWS" hence cognito is used which authenticates users for the web application through Cognito User Pools. If you do not want congito and Appsync you can skip these and directly use the cloudformation template suggested above on point 1. You would not need to manually create or connect the services individually, you can directly download this detailed lab guide [2] and follow the steps to build the solution in your own AWS environment.

The lab guide consists of following:

a) Step-by-step instructions to deploy using AWS Amplify

b) CloudFormation templates

c) Lambda functions

d) MediaConvert job templates