I want to host my website in S3 (because it seems cheaper and i don't have server side script). I have a domain, and i want my domain link to my S3 website. So far, what i do is enabling Static website hosting in my S3 website bucket, and set Route53 record set's Alias Target to my S3 website. it's working. But it's not good enough, i want it to deal with multi regions.
I know that Transfer acceleration can auto sync files to other regions so it's faster for other regions. But i don't know how to make it work with Route53. I hear that some people uses CloudFront to do that but i don't quite understand how. And i don't want to manually create buckets in several regions and manually set up for each region
do you have any suggestion for me?
If your goal is to reduce latency for users worldwide, then Amazon CloudFront is definitely the way to go.
Amazon CloudFront has over 100 edge locations globally, so it has more coverage than merely using AWS regions.
You simply create a CloudFront distribution, point it to your S3 bucket and then point your domain name to CloudFront.
Whenever somebody accesses your content, CloudFront will retrieve it from S3 and cache it in the edge location closest to that user. Then, other users who want the data will receive it from the local cache. Thus, your website appears fast for many users.
See also: Amazon CloudFront pricing
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I am beginner in using AWS and currently I am hosting the assets for a web application using a microservices-based architecture on a S3 bucket. I want to allow the browsers using the application to access the assets. But all over the internet, it is always stated that it's highly recommended to prevent public access to the S3 bucket.
How can I do that without CloudFront, which I won't be using since all of the users are in the same region ?
You cant use S3 for static hosting and follow AWS' best practice around S3 buckets being private - you need to pick one.
The recommended structure is a private S3 bucket, with a public CloudFront distribution in front, and an origin access identity to control access to the origin bucket. Honestly, if you do configure your bucket with just GET access and enable static web hosting its not terrible, but CloudFront offers a couple of significant benefits over S3 static website hosting:-
Private S3, public CloudFront is a better default security stance and your less likely to make several common mistakes - hence why you see this guidance all over the internet.
Hosting files over S3+CloudFront will on average reduce latency and increase download speed compared to just S3 alone even in the same region. There are many edge locations interconnected by super high speed connections all over the world. End users connecting via edge locations effectively take a shorter route to the origin S3 bucket than going directly to the regional S3 bucket over the public internet.
Using CloudFront will probably work out cheaper than S3 alone.
Flexability - CloudFront can access mutiple buckets (or load balencers) and serve different paths from different origins.
If you do go down the CF route (i recomend you do), for the extra effort you get many benefits.
Bare in mind CF respects any caching headers associated with your objects in S3, or uses defaults set on the CF distribution. Be careful setting long cache times on files - you can clear the cache (called an invalidation) in CF - but end users browsers that have downloaded the file will also likely respect the cache headers (this is where you can use "cache busting" query strings...).
I have users across the world and they GET object from Amazon S3 buckets. So I'd like to set up 4 different buckets in different regions (3 of them are replications). Cloudfront is not my choice since the first-time request latency is still high. Is there any service that can receive the GET request from the user, automatically decide which bucket it should get files from with the fastest speed, GET files from that bucket and then send back the file to the user?
I have looked up Route 53, but it's all about hosting a website. My case is a mobile app. I just want to get the files from the server.
Thank you so much!
You can deploy your application in the specific regions you want and make sure in code that the files are come from the same region bucket.
Then you can use Route53 GeoLocation/Weighted routing policy and then based on your users location the request will go to that region and be processed accordingly.
I'm working on a website that contains photo galleries, and these images are stored on Amazon S3. Since Amazon charges like $0.01 per 10k GET-requests, it seems that a potential troll could seriously drive up my costs with a bot that makes millions of page requests per day.
Is there an easy way to protect myself from this?
The simplest strategy would be to create randomized URLs for your images.
You can serve these URLs with your page information. But they cannot be guessed by the bruteforcer and will usually lead to a 404.
so something like yoursite/images/long_random_string
Add aws Cloudfront service for your S3 object images. So it will retrieve the cached data from the edge location.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html
As #mohan-shanmugam pointed out, you should use a CloudFront CDN with your origin as the S3 bucket. It is considered bad practice for external entities to hit S3 buckets directly.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/request-rate-perf-considerations.html
With a CloudFront distribution, you can alter your S3 bucket's security policy to only allow access from the distribution. This will block direct access to S3 even if the URLs are known.
In reality, you would likely suffer from website performance way before needing to worry about additional charges as a direct DDOS attempt against S3 should result in AWS throttling API requests.
In addition, you can set up AWS WAF in front of your CloudFront distribution and use it for advanced control of security related concerns.
We want to host images on our application as fast as possible. As we already have an AWS setup we prefer to host our images on S3 buckets (but are open for alternatives).
The challenge is routing the request to the closest S3 bucket.
Right now we use Amazon Route 53 with geolocation routing policy to the closes EC2 instance wich redirects to the respective bucket. We find this inefficent as the request goes:
origin->DNS->EC2->S3 and would prefer
origin->DNS->S3. Is it possible to bind two static website S3 buckets to the same domain where request are routed based on Geolocation?
Ps: We have looked into cloudfront, but since many of the images are dynamic and are only viewed once we would like the origin to be as close to the user as possible.
It's not possible to do this.
In order for an S3 bucket to serve files as a static website, the bucket name must match the domain that is being browsed. Due to this restriction, it's not possible to have more than one bucket serve files for the same domain because you cannot create more than one bucket with the same name, even in different regions.
CloudFront can be used to serve files from S3 buckets, and those S3 buckets don't need to have their names match the domain. So at first glance, this could be a workaround. However, CloudFront does not allow you to create more than one distribution for the same domain.
So unfortunately, as of this writing, geolocating is not possible from S3 buckets.
Edit for a deeper explanation:
Whether the DNS entry for your domain is a CNAME, an A record, or an ALIAS is irrelevant. The limitation is on the S3 side and has nothing to do with DNS.
A CNAME record will resolve example.com to s3.amazonaws.com to x.x.x.x and the connection will be made to S3. But your browser will still send example.com in the Host header.
When S3 serves files for webpages, it uses the Host header in the HTTP request to determine from which bucket the files should be served. This is because there is a single HTTP endpoint for S3. So, just like when your own web server is hosting multiple websites from the same server, it uses the Host header to determine which website you actually want.
Once S3 has the Host that you want, it compares it against the buckets available. It decided that the bucket name would be used to match against the Host header.
So after a lot of research we did not find an answer to the problem. We did however update our setup. The scenario is that a user clicks a button and will view some images in an IOS app. The request when the user pushes the button is geo rerouted to the nearest EC2 instance for faster performance. Instead of returning the same imagelinks in EU and US we updated it so when clicking in US you get links to an American S3 bucket and the same for Europe. We also put up two cloud front distributions, one in front of each S3 bucket, to increase speed.
I have an application which is a static website builder.Users can create their websites and publish them to their custom domains.I am using Amazon S3 to host these sites and a proxy server nginx to route the requests to the S3 bucket hosting sites.
I am facing a load time issue.As S3 specifically is not associated with any region and the content being entirely HTML there shouldn't ideally be any delay.I have a few css and js files which are not too heavy.
What can be the optimization techniques for better performance? eg: Will setting headers ? or Leverage caching help? I have added an image of pingdom analysis for reference.
Also i cannot use cloudfront as when the user updates an image the edge locations have a delay of few minutes before the new image is reflected.It is not instant update,hence restricting the use for me. Any suggestions on improving it?
S3 HTTPS access from a different region is extremely slow especially TLS handshake. To solve the problem we invented Nginx S3 proxy which can be find over the web. S3 is the best as origin source but not as a transport endpoint.
By the way try to avoid your "folder" as a subdomain but specify only S3 regional(!) endpoint URL instead with the long version of endpoint URL, never use https://s3.amazonaws.com
One the good example that reduces number of DNS calls is the following below:
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/folder/file.jpg
Your S3 buckets are associated with a specific region that you can choose when you create them. They are not geographically distributed. Please see AWS doc about S3 regions: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/
As we can see in your screenshot, it looks like your bucket is located in Singapore (ap-southeast-1).
Are your clients located in Asia? If they are not, you should try to create buckets nearer, in order to reduce data access latency.
About cloudfront, it should be possible to use it if you invalide your objects, or just use new filenames for each modification, as tedder42 suggested.