CDNs

Let's stand up a CloudFront distribution in front of our S3 bucket.

1. Navigate to the CloudFront section of the AWS console and click "Create Distribution."

2. Set the following options, leaving anything else as default:

   1. Under "Get Started," set the distribution name. I named mine tubelycdn.
   2. Under "Specify Origin":
      1. Origin type should be "Amazon S3."
      2. Choose your private S3 bucket as the origin.
   3. Under "Enable Security," check "Use monitor mode."
   4. Create the distribution.

   I'm not going to cover every possible configuration option here; read the AWS documentation if you're interested. My goal is to cover the important stuff from a conceptual standpoint.

   Behind the scenes, creating the distribution through the UI also updates the S3 bucket policy to allow the new distribution to access files in the bucket. If you want to check the policy, go back to your S3 bucket, click on the "Permissions" tab, and look for "Bucket Policy."

3. Manually find an object in your S3 bucket (upload one if you don't have one). Copy the object's URL and paste it into your browser: it should give you a permissions error. Good! That means your bucket can't be accessed directly.

4. Go back to CloudFront and copy your distribution's domain name. It should look something like this: https://dkdi1medkine9a.cloudfront.net. Update the URL of the object you pasted into your browser to use the CloudFront domain instead of the S3 domain, which may take a minute to update.

   It should look something like this when you're done: https://dkdi1medkine9a.cloudfront.net/landscape/5n4K7uoEJ-dffddffdfsdfsdf.mp4. You should be able to load that URL in the browser and see the object. Congrats, you're hitting an edge server now!

Run and submit the CLI tests after ensuring that the distribution is fully deployed.