Tech Stuff

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.

Today Amazon anounced new tiered pricing for the S3 service.

For the United States: 

Storage — Current Pricing (thru October 31st)

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Storage — New Pricing (effective November 1st)

• $0.150 per GB – first 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.140 per GB – next 50 TB / month of storage used
• $0.130 per GB – next 400 TB /month of storage used
• $0.120 per GB – storage used / month over 500 TB

Amazon explains the S3 outage that occurred Friday morning. They got it corrected rather quickly, but with so many start ups using it as part of their hosting environment there are surely more gray hair out there now. Luckily I only use it for backups right now so not a big deal for me. One of the good things coming out of this is that they say they are working on a service health dashboard and expect to release it shortly.