Amazon CloudFront: HTTPS Access, Another Edge Location, Price Reduction

We continue to enhance Amazon CloudFront at a rapid pace. Here’s the latest and greatest:

1. We’ve added a new edge location in New York City. This location will provide even better performance to users requesting your content from New York and the northeastern United States.
2. We’ve reduced pricing for CloudFront HTTP requests by 25%. The prices now start at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.
3. You can now deliver content over an HTTPS connection by replacing the “http:” with “https:” in the links to your CloudFront content.
4. You can configure any of your CloudFront distributions so that the content must be accessed by an HTTPS connection.

The first three items should be pretty much self-explanatory, so let’s take a look at the fourth…

You can now configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution such that access to the Amazon S3 objects represented by the distribution is limited to HTTPS connections. You can do this to protect your content as it travels from a CloudFront edge location to your client application, or to avoid the dreaded “mixed content” warning issued by many web browsers.

Here’s a simple diagram:

To configure your distribution in this matter you simply set the distribution’s RequiredProtocols attribute to the value “https”. If you do not set this attribute, the contents of the distribution will be accessible via both HTTP and HTTPS. You cannot currently make HTTPS requests via a CNAME.

The following third-party applications provide simple tools to set up your distributions for HTTPS access:

• CloudBuddy Personal
• CloudBerry S3 Explorer
• Bucket Explorer

These third-party tools are provided by companies unaffiliated with AWS.

— Jeff;