Tech Stuff

At the end of August Amazon announced that CloudFront now has an invalidation feature which can clear the files from the edge locations before the expiration period.  The other day I got to try out this new feature when I had a file I needed to update and didn’t really want to wait the 1hr TTL that I had set.  I downloaded the newest version of CloudBerry Explorer which supports the new feature and gave it a try.  It didn’t seem to be instantaneous, but the roughly 10 minutes I had to wait was much better than waiting the hour.  Not sure if this time delay is what everyone else experiences or if it was something on my computer caching it longer.

I just recently read that you can now set the TTL of an object on Amazon’s Cloudfront to 1 hr instead of the 24 hr minimum that it used to be.  I only found this out because I was reading through the discussion forums looking to see if there was an ETA of when this could be done.  Didn’t know this had been around since April.  Since Amazon didn’t include it on any of the monthly announcements of new/improved features I figured I would share.

The default for an object is still 24 hours, but you can use the HTTP Header Expires to set a different expiration.  If the time is less than an hour, Cloudfront will default to 1 hour.  I still wish there was a way to expire a given object at anytime, but this is a big step forward.  However, it would be nice if there was a tool out there that would allow me to set a default expires time period when I upload an object to S3 based on the content type.  In my case, I can usually have my images set to a 24 hour TTL, but there are some HTML, CSS and Javascript files that I would want at only an hour.  Right now I use S3Fox and Cloudberry to manage my S3 buckets.