HowTo – Understanding And Using Amazon’s Cloud Front Service

Filed under: Site Management —

amazon_logoAmazon.com seems to be getting into the information processing service on a much stronger level then it has in the past.

Moving from a few basic services to now supporting many website backends including popular ones like Twitter.com

Amazon’s Cloud Front Service is one of their popular tools that lets you deploy your websites assets around the world to many different servers. Once your files are deployed they can be served to visitors based on GeoIP Type locators.

Your Images and files will load faster for people who are in distant locations (the other side of the world) relative to your main hosting account.

So how does it work?

It is pretty easy… you just signup for an AWS account and then download their asset organizer software that is available for FireFox Browsers or you design your own front end.

First you create a Bucket or Folder to hold your Assets.

Then you upload your assets to the folder and they are mirrored to Amazon’s other servers.

Your files must be set to publicly readable so you can use them and others can see them. You have the option of Private, Public Readable and Public Read/Write and Authenticated Read Only.

Now is the only tricky part.

Your assets will have a Amazon Domain assigned to them such as:

123abc.cloudfront.net

You can either use that directly or a better way is to define a CNAME SubDomain on your hosting account for your Domain and then point it at the Amazon Domain Name.

Since most people use cPanel for hosting the setup of a CNAME redirect is pretty easy and fast. Read or Watch the Videos to learn how to do it on your hosting account.

In the end your assets will be linked as such:

stuff.myhost.com Which will point to 123abc.cloudfront.net

and they will be placed on your pages as such
<img src=”http://stuff.myhost.com/image.jpg”>

Amazon has servers in the following Locations at this time:

United States

  • Ashburn, VA
  • Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Miami, FL
  • Newark, NJ
  • Palo Alto, CA
  • Seattle, WA
  • St. Louis, MO
 Europe

  • Amsterdam
  • Dublin
  • Frankfurt
  • London
 Asia

  • Hong Kong
  • Tokyo

So that is pretty much it.

Not a lot to think about and not a lot to manage until you start thinking about all of the assets that you must control and this would be a problem that you will come across whether the asset is on your server or not.

For more info or to signup visit

http://aws.amazon.cloudfront.com