Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront

So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s see:

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Right, and that’s probably what they charge for in the CloudFront section, so the fact is that I haven’t been using it at all. Gathering all the static content from the so-called “origin server” is far from what CloudFront can do. What I’ve been using for the past few months is simply delivering content from my S3 server, which is also good, but “good” is not enough. I browsed throughout the AWS Management Console for hours and couldn’t find out what I was doing wrong, the server kept pulling the content from the origin. Then, finally I realized that after I’ve created a distribution I was given two addresses and as they said, one was the origin server, the second one was the CloudFront server (it’s a .cloudfront.net subdomain underlined red), thus the settings I got all wrong were at the DNS level, not the Management Console.

So I logged back to my registrar, found the DNS management options and switched my CNAMEs to the CloudFront domain instead of the origin bucket and hoped that everything works well. The very next day I got my very first bill for Amazon CloudFront – three cents! Hurray! I’m not sure if this is well written in the documentation for CloudFront and S3 (I doubt that people read them) but I have a few friends who have experienced the same problem and why the address of the origin bucket in the first place? Weird. The S3 Firefox Organizer groups both fields into one and that’s even more weird. Oh well, glad I sorted it out.