Deliver Content Faster with HAQM CloudFront

When you click here, the AWS Management Console will open in a new browser window. Type S3 in the search bar and select S3 to open the console.

In the S3 dashboard, choose Create bucket.

If this is the first time you have created a bucket, you will see a screen that looks like the image pictured here.

If you have already created S3 buckets, your S3 dashboard will list all the buckets you have created.

Enter a unique bucket name. Bucket names must be unique across all existing bucket names in HAQM S3. There are a number of other restrictions on S3 bucket names as well. Then select a Region to create your bucket in.

You have the ability to set permission settings for your S3 bucket. By default, S3 objects are set to private. You will need to make your image publicly readable. Select ACLs enabled under Object Ownership, deselect “Block all public access” and select the checkbox “I acknowledge that the current settings might result in this bucket and the objects within becoming public.”

You have many useful options for your S3 bucket including Versioning, Server Access Logging, Tags, Object-level Logging and Default Encryption. We won't enable these features for this tutorial.

Select Create bucket.

You will see your new bucket in the S3 console. Click on your bucket’s name to navigate to the bucket. Your bucket name will not be the same as pictured in the screenshot to the right.

You are in your bucket’s home page.

Select Upload.

Upload the cloudfront-test-image.png file by selecting Add files and selecting the file or dragging the cloudfront-test-image.png file to the upload box.

Open the Permissions dropdown. Select Choose from predefined ACLs and then select Grant public-read access. Select the checkbox “I understand the risk of granting public-read access to the specified objects.”

Select Upload.

When you click here, the AWS Management Console will open in a new browser tab. Type CloudFront in the search bar and select CloudFront to open the console.

Select Create a CloudFront distribution.

You will now configure your settings.

In, Origin domain select the name of the S3 bucket you stored cloudfront-test-image.png in.

You can leave the rest of the configuration settings with the default values for this tutorial.  If you would like to learn more about each configuration setting, please read below.

Learn More About Configuration Settings

Default cache behavior settings:

• See Cache behavior settings.

Distribution settings:

• Price class: CloudFront has three Price Classes determined by the number of edge locations you want supported throughout the globe. By default, CloudFront uses all edge locations to ensure the best performance. For more information, see HAQM CloudFront Pricing.

• AWS WAF web ACL: If you want to allow or block HTTP and HTTPS requests based on criteria you specify, choose the web ACL to associate with this distribution. For more information, see the AWS WAF, AWS Firewall Manager, and AWS Shield Advanced Developer Guide. 

• Alternate domain name (CNAME): CloudFront will automatically assign you a domain name when you create a web distribution (for example, http://abcdefghi888.cloudfront.net/filename.jpg). You can also specify your own domain name in the URLs for your objects (such as http://yourDomain.com/filename.jpg) once you update your DNS configuration to route DNS queries to your CloudFront distribution. For this tutorial, leave this field blank.

• Custom SSL certificate: CloudFront provides a default certificate or you can specify custom SSL certificate.

• Default root object: This is where you specify the object that you want CloudFront to request from your origin when a user requests just the root URL of your distribution. For example, a user requests http://www.example.com/, and you can specify that http://www.example.com/product-description.html is delivered. Specifying a default root object avoids exposing the contents of your distribution.

• Standard logging: CloudFront can log information about each request for an object and store the log files in an HAQM S3 bucket. There is no extra charge to enable logging, but you accrue HAQM S3 charges for storing and accessing files.

• Bucket for logs: If you specified an HAQM S3 bucket to store access logs in, CloudFront can record information about each user request for an object and store the files in the specified HAQM S3 bucket. You can enable or disable logging at any time. For more information about CloudFront access logs, see Access Logs.

• Log prefix: If you chose On for Logging, you can specify the string that you want CloudFront to prefix to the access log filenames for this distribution. For more information about CloudFront access logs, see Access Logs.

• Cookie logging: When using HAQM S3 as the origin for your objects, HAQM S3 doesn't process cookies, so unless your distribution also includes an HAQM EC2 or other custom origin, you need to select Off for the value of Cookie Logging. For more information about cookies, see Caching content based on cookies.

• Description: You can enter any comments that you want to save with the distribution.

Once you configure your distribution, CloudFront will create the distribution and propagate it throughout the CloudFront network for you to use.  Select Create distribution.

After this process is complete, your status column will change from In Progress to Enabled.

Note: This can take a few minutes to complete.

The domain name that CloudFront assigns to your distribution appears in your list of distributions. Keep this in mind, you will need it for the next step. Clicking on the Distribution ID field takes you to a page where you will see the full CloudFront domain under Domain Name.

Open a text editor on your computer. Copy and paste the following HTML code:

<html>

<head>My CloudFront Test</head>

<body>

<p>My text content goes here.</p>

<p><img src="http://domain name/object name" alt="my test image">

</body>

</html>

• Replace domain name with the domain name that CloudFront assigned to your distribution, such as d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net.

• Replace object name with the name of your image file in the HAQM S3 bucket - in our case, cloudfront-test-image.png.

• Save the text in a file as mycloudfronttest.html.

Open your HTML file in a web browser to verify that the link works.

Select the checkbox next to the distribution you created and choose Disable.

You will be asked to confirm. Choose Disable.

Select the checkbox next to the distribution you created and choose Delete.

You will be asked to confirm. Choose Delete.