How To: Integrating Amazon CDN in 4 Simple Steps

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 2, 2008 Comments

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Integrating Amazon CDN in 4 Simple Steps

The news that Amazon is now offering a low-cost CDN has likely excited many people. Aptly named CloudFront, this service is stirring up a lot of attention. In our overview of the new service, we outlined the basic steps to use CloudFront.

In this post, we thought we would give you a little more detail on those steps to help you get started sooner.

Using Amazon CloudFront is a good idea if you have a lot of content that is fairly static and doesn't need to be dynamically generated every time someone requests it. Images are a primary example of content that is static for the most part. You may even have some web pages that don't change often — like Contact Us or About Us.

These things lend themselves well to being served by a Content Delivery Network like Amazon CloudFront. And setting up the service is fairly straight forward as you will soon see.

Getting Started

A few housekeeping items we need to cover before we dig into the real work.

You need to have an Amazon Web Services Account, an Amazon S3 Account and a CloudFront Account ? we?ll explain how to get these in step 1 below.
Basic Technical Knowledge Required: XML, Web Services
Development language experience in one of the following languages: Ruby, Java, PHP, Python or .NET

Common Terms

You should be familiar with the following terms used by Amazon Web Services:

Object: Objects are the files you want delivered using CloudFront. These can include images, css files, web pages, media files. Files delivered via CloudFront must be publicly readable.
Origin Server: The origin server is the home of the original version of your objects. CloudFront location servers will retrieve the objects needed from the origin server.
Distribution: A distribution links the Amazon S3 bucket that contains your objects with a domain name assigned by CloudFront.

4 Steps to Integrate Amazon CloudFront

We aren't going to focus on the exact coding required to integrate with CloudFront — Amazon does a fine job of this themselves. What we want is to explain the steps you would take and point out things that you need to be aware of before taking the next step of actually getting started.

Here are the steps at a glance:

Get and set up Amazon S3 and CloudFront accounts
Create your Amazon S3 bucket
Create your distribution and get domain name
Decide what you want to use CloudFront for and create the appropriate links

Step 1: Setting Up your Amazon S3 and CloudFront Accounts

To access any web service AWS offers, you must first create an AWS account. This account is required to use any of the AWS products. Signing up provides you with a couple of access key identifiers (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) which are required to sign up for S3 and CloudFront.

The Access Key ID is used to identify yourself as the true sender of requests and the Secret Access Key is a secure key that only you see. Because the Access Key is not a secure key, you create a digital signature using your secret key that helps confirm you are the true requester.

You will need to place these keys somewhere in code files to be used when coding to talk to the web services for either S3 or CloudFront.

Once you have the AWS account, you can then sign up for both Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

You need to sign up for Amazon S3 because this is where you will store your objects for CloudFront to access (your Origin Server).