CDN vs S3 (opens in new tab)

I don't think you're an idiot, it's more likely that you were just unaware of cloudfront or perhaps CDNs in general.

S3 is for storing files, Cloudfront is for serving cached versions of them really quickly out of edge locations (i.e. the closest CDN datacentre to the user that requests it).

In your usecase, your best bet is to use them in combination. Set up a Cloudfront distribution to point to your S3 bucket, then setup DNS to point to your Cloudfront distribution.

One big point to note is that you need to either:

* Configure Cloudfront to expire objects after a TTL (time-to-live) that is reasonable to you (e.g. 1 hour, 1 day etc). You can do this from the Cloudfront 'new distribution' wizard.

OR

* Let Cloudfront respect HTTP headers and then make S3 (or whatever your custom origin is) set cache-control headers that make sense for how often you update your site. Not sure if/how you can do this with S3, with a custom origin its your app so you can set whatever http headers you like.

To be clear: if you don't do this, I'm pretty sure cloudfront caches things forever, or at least a very long time.

Personally, I think triggering cache invalidations should only be for emergencies (e.g. someone has uploaded questionable content to serve to other users and it's cached in at and edge). Rather than screwing around with that, save yourself some headaches: pick a sensible TTL and wait a little longer to have things up to date at your edges.

Note that by using Cloudfront in this manner, you get the performance benefit of serving static files. If performance at the expense of convenience was your main reason for going with static site generation, you might want to rethink that decision (there are other perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a static site generator, security being my favourite).

Do feel free to ping me over email if you have any questions on the above.

You should simply put CloudFront in front of S3.

In that case, you get the benefit of both worlds.

You're not clueless. S3 is almost certainly good enough for what you're doing.

I wrote a static site generator at the beginning of this year:)

https://github.com/jimktrains/gus

You should really be using CloudFront and "NOT" S3 if you are looking for a CDN solution. There is a reason why CloudFront exists after all. S3 is a merely a drop-in storage option, consider it as a big file system residing within big fat piped data centers.

Back Fastly with your S3 static site. Works really well.

Check out cloudpress: https://github.com/cloudpress/cloudpress

I think I'm going to go with CloudFront, but I'm pretty upset about not being able to use a naked domain.

I am in the process of abandoning Cloudfront, because they have a serious bug when serving video files. They serve HTTP 206 (Range-Get) as HTTP 1.0 but 206 didn't exist in HTTP 1.0. Chrome and Firefox treat this as "uncacheable", thus media assets bypass the local media cache.

Depending on the nature of the content, Cloudfront is not usable for video, particularly the kind where people seek around a bunch, like instructional videos and tutorials. Also, people with slow connections expect the video to buffer while paused. This doesn't happen if you serve the videos from cloudfront.

I don't know about Cloudfront vs Rackspace+Akamai, however, based on some quick tests I did a year ago, I seem to recall that Rackspace+Akamai didn't deliver the same performance as professional Akamai services. In my experiments, Rackspace+Akamai used different servers, often located farther away, than big Akamai sites. (If anybody has background information about this, I would be very interested to hear.)

If only Route53 allowed you to point the apex domain at Cloudfront (as I understand it, it's currently S3 or ELB).

@davidandgoliath you would think so. But a lot of companies ignore it.

@molecule obvious to you and I. I wrote this to inform those who think it is a good idea to use S3 as a CDN, that it isn't. If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.

Cloudfront doesn't offer some services that I find necessary, such as nested directory indices (e.g. example.com/folder/ instead of example.com/folder/index.html) and it doesn't return a 404 header on missing pages. I just emailed MaxCDN to see if they provide these.

This is smart, I usually use the precompile with upload to S3 via asset_sync gem. Since Heroku will precompile by default, what do you do to disable it. Just turning on config.serve_static_assets = true is likely not enough.

When S3 first came out, people used it for this without considering its latency issues, and it was a disaster. S3 is not a CDN and shouldn't be used as one; this is the reason for CloudFront.

While I can't compare CloudFront to other CDN's, I do know it works well for my clients that have been using it (and certainly better than serving directly from S3).

@kmfrk

PostHaven cut off the URI:

curl -I http://phaven-prod.posthaven.netdna-cdn.com/uploads%2F2013-0... HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 20:34:13 GMT Content-Type: binary/octet-stream Content-Length: 52958 Connection: keep-alive x-amz-id-2: NO6o51/19JsQJN9YHc+T/sraZSGNT+f3R+1GWl2QL3aD4SubqazjbMURb4VYaZyS x-amz-request-id: E640348D2D6EDA7B Last-Modified: Sat, 18 May 2013 00:47:10 GMT ETag: "f95534e9752b560f4acdda20228f90ba" Server: NetDNA-cache/2.2 X-Cache: HIT Accept-Ranges: bytes

Certainly not Amazon, or they wouldn't have provided a service that acts as a CDN based on an S3 bucket.

This is what I ended up doing. I've been using Cloudfront for a while now, but Cloudflare is free, and people seem to indicate it is just as fast if not faster.

I have my static assets on a sub-domain, so I just set cloudflare to cache everything on that subdomain (and left it off on everything else).