Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

Amazon CloudFront is a relatively new product offering in the range of the AWS products. In a simple definition, you could say that CloudFront allows you to easily setup and use Amazon’s infrastructure to distribute your content (web or streaming) globally, by leveraging Amazon’s edge servers in the US, Europe, and Asia. You can just call it a CDN – Content Delivery Network, although that definition applies to services that often provide very distinct additional services, depending on the provider.

My today’s Saturday morning IT exercise was to quickly dive into the CloudFront universe and give it a spin on one of our lab websites – www.wishlist.lu , which is a gift-list creating platform without any real commercial objective.

Read on to find out how easy it was to setup CloudFront on WishList !

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In one of my earlier posts, I explained how I setup Squid to accelerate a remote photo serving appliance that is connected to the Internet over a slow 512Kbit/s ADSL line. I am now using the same setup to accelerate my WordPress blog. The results are quite stunning. Read on to find out more and see some performance results…

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Since a couple of weeks I own a Synology Diskstation DS108j with a 500GB disk that I use as a small fileserver and photoserver at home. The device has many more features, like music streaming and blogging, and can even operate as a fully-fledged LAMP server using the latest versions of PHP and MySQL if you want. I personally use it for backups of my PC and MacBook, and mainly to store the photos I shoot with my Sony Alpha 350 DSLR camera.

As I want to share these photos with family and friends, but only have 512 Kbit/s upstream bandwidth with my ADSL line, browsing the photos remotely was sluggish, until I found a nice solution: install a reverse caching proxy using Squid.

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