Is it possible to host multiple S3 origins under the same CloudFront distribution? Let's say I have bucket A and bucket B which both host static websites--could I add them both as origins to a distribution, and specify a path e.g. /alternate for the origin from bucket B so that visiting http://<distribution>/ took you to the website hosted by bucket A and visiting http://<distribution>/alternate brought you to the one hosted by bucket B? From what I've read so far it seems possible to have multiple origins, not necessarily multiple S3 origins.
You can add multiple S3 origins to a CloudFront distribution
However, behaviors are locked to a specific origin. Behavior controls the path. So, if /static is used by Origin A/S3 A, you can't have /static go to /Origin B/S3 B
Someone suggested using multiple CloudFronts with the same CNAME. That does not work either. CloudFront will not allow the same CNAME to be used in multiple distributions.
Academically speaking, this may be possible through LambdaEdge or some other external process that is checking S3 A, and if it is unavailable (say - under maintenance while new code being pushed), it can go and update CF Behavior for /static to Origin B/S3 B.
I wish AWS came up with a more elegant solution to this use case. Like allowing same CNAME in multiple distributions, or providing some kind of R53 integration with S3 buckets (never tried putting two different S3 buckets behind R53 .. probably will not work because the host header would change)
You can attach a Lambda function as a trigger to intercept CloudFront's routing. The implementation is quite involved; but would permit your specific use case.
Example Implementation:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/dynamically-route-viewer-requests-to-any-origin-using-lambdaedge/
Lambda#Edge:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/lambda-edge.html
Related
How can I configure a Cloudfront distribution to use multiple s3 origins with same hierarchy but using different domain names?
Currently I have a Cloudfront distribution with a distribution domain name for example xyz.cloudfront.net.
The distribution has been configured to use an alternate domain e.g. assets.example.com and to serve content using that domain I've added cname record in my DNS management console that maps assets.example.com to xyz.cloudfront.net.
Now this set up works fine when serving content from a single s3 origin as i can call something like assets.example.com/images/my-image.png
However I want to configure 3 s3 origins as follows which have identical hierarchies i.e. they all have an images folder:
dev-bucket.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com
test-bucket.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com
live-bucket.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com
If I've configured assets.example.com to map to the distribution xyz.cloudfront.net, how is cloudfront going to know which origin to serve from?
basically if im running the dev website i want cloudfront to serve content from the dev origin and if im running the test site then i want it to serve using the test origin.
The only way i can see how can i achieve this is creating 3 different cloud front distribution for each environment and map different domains to the distribution e.g. assets-dev.example.com, assets-test.example.com and assets.example.com for the live site.
Any advise appreciated.
So I have my website hosted on an EC2 server running apache. All works fine and well.
The issue I'm having is that I want my images hosted on S3 (and possibly cached on CloudFront), not on my EC2 server, but want both accessible under the same domain/subdomain.
For example say my website is www.helloworld.com. I want my images to be accessible at www.helloworld.com/images/foobar.png. I want foobar.png to be hosted on S3 and not each one of my EC2 servers though. How can I go about doing this?
Is there and configuration I can do in the AWS console or are there any rewrite rules I can use in Apache? I know I could always just set up a controller that will download the images from S3 and forward them to the user, but this seems wrong to me.
For that you need to put a load-balancer/proxy in front to intercept all requests and dispatch accordingly. That may not be a bad idea anyway (for availability reasons), but a separate host name for images should not be a problem, either (it's not like users will have to see or type those URL).
Using CloudFront, you can have CloudFront receive the initial requests, then based on the path, forward the request to either your EC2 instance or to your S3 bucket.
For example, you could setup the following:
A CloudFront behaviour that upon a path under /images/ would use an S3 origin, and
A default (for everything else) would go to your EC2 instance origin.
We are white labelling site so that mysite.com and site.com and site2.com all share the same code base but different front end UI. They use a lot of the same images, including product images, which are hosted on Amazon S3. The s3 bucket name is based off site.com such that the host is:
https://siteDOTcom-new.s3.amazonaws.com/
Now, we don't care what the Amazon S3 url looks like but some clients do, so we're trying to figure out how to do it. We've tried CNAMEs but that didn't work out. Is it possible to have multiple subdomain aliases for the same S3 bucket?
You should look into Amazon Cloudfront for two reasons:
It would allow you to point to the same s3 buckets with different URLs (e.g. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/CNAMEs.html)
As a CDN, it will give better downloading speeds for people using your site
I've read a lot of articles stating that I should be using Amazon S3 in conjunction with the CDN Cloudfront. I'm currently not doing this. I'm simply using Cloudfront with my standard shared hosting package.
Is it OK to use Cloudfront on its own with my standard shared hosting package? Surely there is no added benefit to using S3 also as the files are already located within Cloudfront.
Any enlightenment on this is much appreciated.
Leigh
S3 allows you to do things like static webhosting, with logging and redirection. I.E www.example.com redirects to example.com. You can then use Cloudfront to place your assets as close to the end user as possible ("nearest edge location"). An excellent guide on how to do this is in the AWS docs. Two main things are that S3 supports https, and changes to files in S3 are reflected instantly. Because Cloudfront is a CDN, you have to manually expire files if you change them, otherwise is could take up to 24 hours to reflect your changes.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/swh/website-hosting-intro.html
A quick comparison between the two is given here:
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/documentation/cloudfront--amazon-s3-vs-amazon-cloudfront.html
There is no problem of using CloudFront against your own origin server comparing to a S3 server.
There are some benefits of using S3:
Data transfer is faster between S3 and CloudFront
Don't need to worry about the stability and maintenance of origin S3 server
Multiple origin regions
There are also benefits if you use your own server:
Cost saving of S3 hosting (this depends on whether you need to pay for your own server)
Easy for customization should you need it
Data storage location for company/country regulation
So it's all depending on your specific circumstances, such as how much you pay for your hosting package, do you need low-level configuration of your origin server, and how sensitivity your data is.
I would say for majority of the small/medium projects, S3 is a perfect place to store data.
Is there a way to use another bucket name when hosting a site (or indeed any content) than just www.example.com.s3-region.amazonaws.com? I want to use multiple buckets so that when I update the site I can rollback a version if problems arrise and so that updates are an atomic switch between site versions. I only want one bucket used for a domain at a time.
I.e. something like
Bucket Names:
www.example.com.bucket1
www.example.com.bucket2
Procedure:
www.example.com currently points to -> www.example.com.bucket1.s3-region.amazonaws.com
New site version is uploaded to www.example.com.bucket2.
Once verified DNS is changed so that www.example.com points to -> www.example.com.bucket2.s3-region.amazonaws.com
This should not work because S3 looks at the hostname of the request (www.example.com) to find out what bucket you're trying to access so the bucket has to have the same name.
But it is possible to achieve what you want with Amazon CloudFront. There are two options:
You can create a single distribution and only update the origin of it (the S3 bucket).
You can create two different distributions and update the DNS settings to point to the desired distribution. You would also need to update the CNAME properties in both of the distributions (remove www.example.com from the old distribution and add it to the new one).