Using Amazon S3 as a CDN Origin

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Zane L.
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The StackPath CDN is compatible with Amazon S3 Buckets as origin Pulls. This may require you setting the Bucket access permissions through Bucket Policy or Access Control List to allow the CDN to obtain access. This article will walk you through the setup process.

Setting up Bucket Access

For this example, the bucket was set up to allow public read-only access, so that anyone can view the contents of the bucket. This will require no preconfigured Public Access settings for your account:

  1. Select Access Control List from the Permissions tab for the bucketS3_permissions.PNG

  2. Select Everyone and enable List Objects to grant public access to only view objects
    List_object_permissions.PNG
You can read more about Amazon AWS permissions and policies here, to configure the bucket access differently, to allow only select access by using examples found here, and our IP list found here. 

Setting Up the CDN

This example uses a bucket named stackpathtesting within the us-east-2 region, please replace any instance of stackpathtesting or <bucketname> with the actual name of your bucket and any instance of us-east-2 or <aws-region> with the actual region for your bucket.

  1. Log in to StackPath
    StackPath_login.PNG
  2. Create a new CDN Site
    Create_CDN_Site.png
  3. Enter the Delivery Domain you would like to use. This can be any valid domain name, but for this example, the bucket address was used.
    selecting_amazon_aws_domain.PNG
  4. Select Amazon S3 as server type
  5. Set the Bucket URL to s3.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/<bucketname>

    amazonaws-buckname_origin.PNG
  6. View the newly created CDN site and select the Settings tab to confirm the Host Header
  7. Now, set a custom Host Header for s3.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com if you used s3.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/<bucketname>. You can do this by clicking the 'Add Custom' button and then entering the custom Host Header in the new input box. Finally, click save to add and set this Host Header.
    S3_Custom_Host_Header.png
  8. Test the CDN URL by visiting it with the browser. This should produce an XML File that contains an index of all of the objects within the bucket. Once this is confirmed, you can now serve your bucket objects over the CDN Cache using
    http://cdn.url/path/to/bucket/object (And replacing cdn.url with the CDN URL was generated upon creating the CDN Site)
    s3_xml.PNG

Next Steps

Connecting the StackPath CDN can be useful for

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