
Amazon CloudFront Adds Default Root Object Capability - pw
http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/08/05/cloudfront-adds-default-root-object-capability/
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hallmark
I honestly wasn't expecting this announcement for a long time. Many people had
requested this functionality, including additions to the base S3 APIs, and I
knew that the easy solution was to extend only CloudFront functionality
without breaking the S3 API's backward compatibility. I spent some shower-time
recently trying to think of workarounds for future clients. :)

My guess had been that Amazon was stalling to prevent a flood of low-volume
AWS accounts simply to host dirt cheap static websites.

Now, if your website doesn't require server side scripting, you can literally
go from paying a few bucks a month for cheap hosting to spending only pennies
using Amazon S3 and CloudFront to host your entire site - reliably and
quickly. I'm not familiar with other cloud file providers, so if this was
possible before Amazon's latest announcement, I'd love to know.

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petervandijck
Love this, now you can finally host static sites on S3. Awesome.

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wizard_2
Only cloudfront, not regular S3.

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gmac
Sadly Cloudfront still won't gzip intelligently, which for a static site means
you're stuck either with excess load times or with hacky JS workarounds. If
and when they sort this out I'll switch from Rackspace's Cloudfiles in an
instant.

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JangoSteve
Now I can finally make a cool easter egg for anyone who tries to access the
roots of my asset domains. I've always wanted to do that. Thanks Amazon!

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enki
woot! this is going to cut down my page load latency by at least another 40ms.

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jreposa
I guess I missed something. Can you explain?

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csulok
So far, Cloudfront's origin servers were hardcoded to be your S3 bucket. So if
you used Amazon as an extra service to serve static files of your website from
a CDN, you'd have to do trickery to set up your website as the S3 bucket's
origin. I assume this is what he was talking about, not having to copy his
file to S3 so the CDN edge location can pull it from S3.

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al_james
No thats not the case. You still have to use S3 as the origin.

This is talking about allowing you to assign a default root document, e.g. a
index.html so that requests to (e.g.) <http://cache.mydomain.com/> will return
something.

