Recently I decided it was important to get away from Google App Engine as my CDN, mostly because I have encountered personally and have been told that many internal corporate networks are blocking Google App Engine IP’s. And since most of my content posted to this blog is relevant to developers, who typically work in the corporate world, I decided to make the move. And boy am I glad I did.
If you already know the purpose of a CDN please skip ahead.
What is a CDN?
According to Wikipedia on what a CDN is:
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottlenecks near that server.
Straight forward enough right? Basically servers specifically designed for delivering static content as fast as possible to the client’s browser so that web pages spend less time loading.
So what is a mirroring CDN?
A mirroring CDN doesn’t require you to upload anything to get started. Basically you point it at your server where all the content is located. As requests are made to the CDN for your static content, it retrieves it from your servers and stores it on the CDN network for a specific amount of time before it looks for a fresh copy. While stored on the CDN network it constantly serves from that cached copy, this reduces the bandwidth and strain on your server, because the CDN only requests the static file once until the CDN file has timed out. The time out is typically an hour or a day, but can be longer based on your settings.
Setting up a mirrored CDN
The first thing you will want to do is setup an Amazon Web Services account, which can be done, for free, here:
After you have a confirmed account, you can start your stop watch for the 5 minutes, if you are really timing me.
- Sign in to the console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home
- Click the Amazon CloudFront tab, and you will see a screen that looks like this:
- Click the Create Distribution button, and this screen will appear:
- Select Other… from the Origin drop down.
- In the Bucket Name enter the domain that you want to mirror, in my case it is coderjournal.com.
- If you want to use a CNAME for your mirroring CDN, which is totally optional, enter it in the CNAMEs textbox, in my case it is cj.mf.io.
- Make sure Distribution Status is set to Enabled.
- After all fields are filled in it will look something like this:
- Click the Create button, and you are done.
- When the State says Deployed you are ready to start serving your content from you new mirroring CDN.
- If you decided to use a CNAME for the CDN, just take the Domain Name field on the left hand column and enter that for the CNAME in your DNS.
Stop your stopwatches, we are done.
How do I use it?
Well this is the great part, and probably the easiest step. Where ever the static files reside on your domain that you entered in as the Bucket Name just use that same path but replace the domain name.
For example, I host a picture of my book on coderjournal.com which can be accessed using the following URL:
If I want to access this same resource from my mirroring CDN, I just swap out the “coderjournal.com” for “cj.mf.io” and the mirrored copy is available from 17 locations around the world. (as of writing this blog post)
To incorporate this in to your web applications just start using the new mirrored CDN domain for you static content instead of your web applications domain.
What will this cost me?
Obviously applications and usages differ but as an example of how dirt cheap this service is in my opinion. Here is the break down for the whopping $1.22 that I have racked up this month so far:
Conclusion
Hopefully this is going to help you take the plunge because you can get a ton of extra bandwidth from your applications server by deploying the static content to a CDN. And between the low cost and easy setup of the CloudFront service, it is really a no-brainer.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Amazon, CDN, CloudFront
Thanks for the article. Maybe I am dense, but can you have CloudFront mirror your site without using S3? It’s not giving me the same option as you mentioned above. When I define the custom/other bucket name it’s turning “domain.com” to “domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com”. Everything I’ve read suggests that you need to use S3 as the bucket. I’d love for CloudFront to truly mirror my site without having to upload to S3 every change. Any clarification would be appreciated.
Hi Aaron,
You have to put a little trust in the Amazon Console right now. They have not updated the terminology to be as transparent as possible yet. You can find more information on this release on the AWS release notes:
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/11/09/cloudfront-adds-support-for-custom-origins-and-sla/
Thanks Nick for your quick reply. That’s great news that it is possible, but I am still having a trouble getting it to work from the console. As mentioned previously, anytime I enter a domain in the “Origin > Other…” it turns it into “domain.com.s3.amazonaws.com” (Heck, I even tried your domain!). I did some search digging, and it looks like Amazon and others say you need to use the API. Amazon: “To create a distribution with a custom origin, you use the CloudFront API” http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudFront/2010-11-01/DeveloperGuide/index.html?CreatingDistributions.html https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=57563
I’d love to figure out if I am doing something wrong, or if the console has changed. Guess I might need to learn the API and break our cURL.
Something must have changed since I created this. Try using the API or one of the tools built around the API. I believe CloudBerry supports custom domains.
http://cloudberrylab.com/
http://blog.cloudberrylab.com/2010/11/introducing-cloudfront-manger.html
Amazon has changed the UI for creating a new distribution. One has to choose the Custom Origin, fill in their domain name as Origin DNS Name. And on the next screen, has to choose the CNAME, comment and other settings.
Thanks Nick, for the wonderful 5-minute post. If you hadn’t spoke out, I would be jealously eying all those Akamai users who could spend a fortune for edges.