S3

As of Februrary 2011 AWS S3 has been able to serve static websites, giving you superior availability for unchanging (or seldom-changing) content. But most websites today are not static; dynamic elements drive essential features such as personalized pages, targeted advertisements, and shopping carts. Today’s release from AWS CloudFront: Support for Dynamic Content alleviates some of the challenge of running dynamic websites. You can now configure a custom set of URL patterns to always be passed through to the origin server. This allows you to “poke holes” in the CDN cache for providing dynamic content. ...

AWS recently added support for receiving Simple Notification Service notifications when S3 loses a Reduced Redundancy Storage S3 object. This raises a number of questions: What the heck does that even mean? Why would I want to do that? Under what conditions does it make financial sense to do that? Let’s take a look at these questions, and we’ll also do a bit of brainstorming (please participate!) to design a service that puts it all together. ...

This is a true story about a lot of data. The cast of characters is as follows: The Protagonist: Me. The Hero: Jets3t, a Java library for using Amazon S3. The Villain: Decisions made long ago, for forgotten reasons. Innocent Bystanders: My client. Once Upon a Time… Amazon S3 is a great place to store media files and allows these files to be served directly from S3, instead of from your web server, thereby saving your server’s network and CPU for more important tasks. There are some gotchas with serving files directly from S3, and it is these gotchas that had my client locked in to paying for bandwidth and CPU to serve media files directly from his web server. ...

S3 has an “eventual consistency” model, which presents certain limitations on how S3 can be used. Today, Amazon released an improvement called “read-after-write-consistency” in the EU and US-west regions (it’s there, hidden at the bottom of the blog post). Here’s an explanation of what this is, and why it’s cool. What is Eventual Consistency? Consistency is a key concept in data storage: it describes when changes committed to a system are visible to all participants. Classic transactional databases employ various levels of consistency, but the golden standard is that after a transaction commits the changes are guaranteed to be visible to all participants. A change committed at millisecond 1 is guaranteed to be available to all views of the system - all queries - immediately thereafter. ...

Amazon S3 is a great place to store static content for your web site. If the content is sensitive you’ll want to prevent the content from being visible while in transit from the S3 servers to the client. The standard way to secure the content during transfer is by https - simply request the content via an https URL. However, this approach has a problem: it does not work for content in S3 buckets that are accessed via a virtual host URL. Here is an examination of the problem and a workaround. ...