If I later discover a better image to use, so replace hello_sam.jpg with this new version, then how does the CDN know that it should re-request the new image from the source? It doesn’t. Imagine I’ve uploaded a file named hello_sam.jpg to S3, and it gets served through the CDN. This is a good thing, because careful choice of file names is the easiest way to prevent CDN caching problems: The filenames of uploaded image assets are irrelevant-they are used directly in the HTML, so end users won’t care about their names. This is a really helpful feature of S3, as our web-app never needs to see the data-it just gets uploaded straight to S3, rather than uploading to our app and then onto S3 later.

This means that our app can pass a URL to the client, to which that browser can upload a file. The files are uploaded directly to S3 using the signed URLs feature. Uploading the assets to S3 is performed via the admin interface the team built. This is really rather easy to set up in AWS, and since I’ve been working on the opposite side of the world to the data centre for the last 3 months, I’ve really noticed the difference a CDN makes. Since this is a web project, we’ve then got a CloudFront CDN in front of the storage bucket, to ensure really fast delivery of content to users irrespective of their location on the planet. Menu AWS S3: how to download file instead of displaying in-browser Īs part of a project I’ve been working on, we host the vast majority of assets on S3 (Simple Storage Service), one of the storage solutions provided by AWS (Amazon Web Services).

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