Tag Archives: dns

Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront

So, three months later I realized I wasn’t using CloudFront at all! Huh? I took a deeper look at my Amazon Web Services bill last month and found out that I wasn’t even charged for CloudFront! But hey, I delivered all my static content through CloudFront distributions from S3 and I had a subdomain mapped to those distributions and everything was working fine (thought I).. Let’s see:

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Right, and that’s probably what they charge for in the CloudFront section, so the fact is that I haven’t been using it at all. Gathering all the static content from the so-called “origin server” is far from what CloudFront can do. What I’ve been using for the past few months is simply delivering content from my S3 server, which is also good, but “good” is not enough. I browsed throughout the AWS Management Console for hours and couldn’t find out what I was doing wrong, the server kept pulling the content from the origin. Then, finally I realized that after I’ve created a distribution I was given two addresses and as they said, one was the origin server, the second one was the CloudFront server (it’s a .cloudfront.net subdomain underlined red), thus the settings I got all wrong were at the DNS level, not the Management Console.

Cloud Tips: Rediscovering Amazon CloudFront

So I logged back to my registrar, found the DNS management options and switched my CNAMEs to the CloudFront domain instead of the origin bucket and hoped that everything works well. The very next day I got my very first bill for Amazon CloudFront – three cents! Hurray! I’m not sure if this is well written in the documentation for CloudFront and S3 (I doubt that people read them) but I have a few friends who have experienced the same problem and why the address of the origin bucket in the first place? Weird. The S3 Firefox Organizer groups both fields into one and that’s even more weird. Oh well, glad I sorted it out.

Cloud Tips: Amazon EC2 Email & S3 CNAME Issues

So you moved your blog or website (or whatever) to Amazon EC2 and wondering why your e-mail notices have stopped working? Now I know there’s bunch of articles about the EC2 email issues, and most of them state that the letters are getting into the spam boxes or aren’t getting delivered at all, because Amazon’s IP pool has been blacklisted by most e-mail providers.

Don’t panic! Not just yet.. You might as well try the postfix via google mail or perhaps some paid mail relay servers, but hey, the php mail function requires the sendmail daemon to be running, and if you’re using the Fedora Core 8 AMI on EC2, you might as well try to turn it on:

service sendmail start

Worked for me, and the messages aren’t being marked as spam, while I’m still getting messages from my WordPress installation on MediaTemple marked as Junk by Windows Live Mail ;) I don’t believe Amazon’s in the blacklists… Really… Anyone, but not Amazon .. Right?

The next AWS issue a novice is going to bump into is the CNAME dillema. It’s so straightforward though, really… Let’s say I want an S3 bucket on s3.foller.me instead of the good old s3.amazonaws.com address. Create a new bucket called s3.foller.me, go to your DNS editor and add a CNAME record for s3.foller.me pointing to s3.foller.me.s3.amazonaws.com. Done. The bucket name and the CNAME have to be the same and this is the one and only trick.

Happy clouding, cheers!