A Demo on AWS CloudFront Distribution Using Amazon S3 Origin

Introduction

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides.

Amazon CloudFront stores and caches content in data centers located around the globe, allowing it to deliver content to users from the nearest location quickly. This reduces the time and cost of providing content over long distances, resulting in a better user experience and increased performance.

As you may know, a CDN, or content delivery network, is what CloudFront is. It can hasten the dissemination of static or dynamic web content to your users. Examples include HTML, CSS, images, JavaScript, and more.

You must specify the location of the file before Amazon CloudFront can quickly deliver it to your users, and that is the concept behind the origin.

Any HTTP server, including your Amazon EC2 instance, application load balancer (ALB), S3 static website, etc., can be the origin.

If your bucket is not set up as a static website and you wish to deliver your bucket content normally, you utilize s3 origin. You enter bucket-name.s3.regionname.amazonaws.com as the origin domain when building the distribution. But if you want to use Amazon S3, your origin domain would be bucket-name.S3-website.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com.

When using Amazon S3 origin, you have two options: either keep your bucket public so that your users can access it via an Amazon CloudFront URL, or you may keep the bucket private and configure OAI or OAC.

A Demo to Create AWS CloudFront Distribution with Amazon S3 Origin

Step 1: Create an Amazon S3 Bucket

Open the AWS Management Console and log in. Use the Amazon S3 service search box or the Services -> Storage -> Choose Amazon S3.

After entering the Amazon S3 dashboard, select Create Bucket.

Choose a region for your Amazon S3 bucket’s location and give it a distinctive name.

Click Create bucket after keeping the other settings at their defaults.

Step 2: Upload a Few Files into Amazon S3 Bucket

Navigate into your bucket by clicking the name of the bucket.

Click Upload -> Add files from within your bucket to add files.

Click Upload after selecting your file.

In the bucket, I’ve added the file diagram.png. Later, we’ll attempt to use Amazon CloudFront to access diagram.png.

Step 3: Make Your Bucket Public

The newly created bucket is now private. Let’s make it public.

Click Edit under the Block public access (bucket settings) section by selecting the permissions tab.

Uncheck Block all public access and then click Save Modifications as shown below.

Confirm should be typed into the box, then clicked.

This was the initial action. To make this bucket public, add a bucket policy next.

When you reach the Bucket policy section, scroll down and select Edit while still in the permissions tab.

Enter a bucket policy similar to this:

Then select Save Changes. Your bucket has just become public. If you use a different bucket name, it is important to alter the ARN, which currently reads arn:aws:s3:::cloudfront-demo-ck. Make the resource’s ARN look like this: arn:aws:s3:::bucket-name.

Now, if you look at the permissions page, you will see that bucket access is public. Therefore, anyone can now access your things.

Try serving it from Amazon CloudFront.

Step 4: Create an Amazon CloudFront Distribution with Amazon S3 Origin

To access the Amazon CloudFront service, perform a search.

To create an Amazon CloudFront distribution, click the button in the screenshot below.

Choose your origin file server from the Origin domain in our instance Amazon S3. If you click in the box, you will see several options, including a list of your Amazon S3 bucket. Pick a name for your bucket.

All of my buckets are mentioned in the Amazon S3 origin type, as you can see. The cloudfront-demo-ck bucket is what I’ve chosen.

Take note of the path name, which is cloudfront-demo-ck.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com.

Keep the origin path empty.

For Amazon CloudFront to be able to access your bucket, as we previously covered, either your bucket must be public, or OAC must be configured so that only Amazon CloudFront can access it:

Note: OAC is usually suggested. However, we are choosing a public bucket for this blog’s simplicity.

Leave everything else at its default setting and click on Create the distribution by scrolling down.

It was successful in creating your distribution. It takes some time to get up and become operational.

Step 5: Validate Accessing Your Files via Amazon CloudFront

Keep in mind that we stored diagram.png in our bucket.

The URL https://CloudFront-Domain>/file-name> is in your browser, which is at https://d2qsf4u4m24m41.cloudfront.net/diagram.png. The diagram.png appears in the browser as expected.

As a result, your Amazon CloudFront distribution with Amazon S3 origin has been successfully configured.

You will see an error similar to the one below if your S3 bucket is not public or CloudFront does not have access to the Amazon S3 bucket via OAI or OAC.

AccessDenied is returned by your Amazon CloudFront distribution, as seen in the screenshot. The situation will be great for you if you fix the permission problem.

Conclusion

We talked about the Amazon CloudFront distribution and the numerous origin servers that it supports in this blog. Later, we learned how to use Amazon S3 as the origin for an AWS CloudFront distribution.

We verified a file’s access using Amazon CloudFront after uploading it to an Amazon S3 bucket. We also witnessed the results of denying Amazon CloudFront access to your bucket.

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Drop a query if you have any questions regarding Amazon CloudFront and I will get back to you quickly.

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