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Can you share your needs with me so I can pass them along to the S3 team?

Tell the CloudFront team to support adding custom HTTP headers to client responses (not the currently supported headers added to the origin requests), such as HSTS. CloudFlare and others already support this.

Thanks Jeff, I just sent you an email:

https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QOU4DQDbS8e4tddfI22J0w/s3-prer...

Of course this won't yet show up in Google until we get that nginx proxy stood up or this feature gets implemented. :-)

OT: That fwd:everyone service is really cool. Damn :)

Thanks! Consider making an account, we're re-launching the site in the next couple weeks so there should be a lot of good content up there shortly.

Looks really good. Will sign up shortly.

So, you're building a pre-rendering system, but only Google gets the benefit?

Also, doesn't google penalize sites that serves different content to googlebot and other UAs?

> Doesn't google penalize sites that serves different content to googlebot and other UAs?

The content you're serving to Google needs to accurately reflect the content users are seeing.

This is really something that needs to be setup/supported at the CloudFront layer (as CloudFlare and other CDNs already do) instead of S3. The danger is that somebody sets an HSTS or other security-related header on their bucket and breaks access for all other customers inadvertently for their customers that fetch from the S3 domain.

> While I'm not going to complain about a price reduction, I'd honestly be more excited if S3 implemented support for additional headers and redirect rules. Right now, anyone hosting a single page app (e.g. Angular/React) behind S3 and Cloudfront is going to get an F on securityheaders.io.

You can setup "Origin Custom Headers" in CloudFront ;)

That's for sending headers to your web server or S3 though, not for sending headers to the user. There are a few extra headers you can send to the user, but not the security related ones.

Take a look at Netlify (disclaimer, I'm a co-founder), you'll get redirects, built-in prerendering, automated deployments, custom headers, etc. All with full cache-ability on our CDN.

https://www.netlify.com

I can vouch for Netlify. We use them for all our stuff at Graphcool and it is awesome. Going from S3+CF to netlify provides a step improvement similar to going from EC2 instances to a managed docker cluster.

Hmm, as someone who is about to move from using a webserver to hosting our single page app on S3 you may have just convinced me not to.

What exactly are the benefits over simply setting up nginx if not simplicity? Yeah, it's great to just serve the asset from s3 but the complexity of what you just described negates it almost entirely.

> What exactly are the benefits over simply setting up nginx if not simplicity?

We weren't fully aware of these limitations when we decided to host our site on S3. Had we been, we may have just used nginx.

There are obviously a ton of benefits to S3 and Cloudfront, it's just than in practice you can't really get them if you need Google to index your site. And while Google claims they can now execute javascript and include async content, in practice this isn't true for any real Angular or React site.

And even if every search engine were to magically execute js correctly, you'd still need to prerender your site in order for Facebook and Twitter to populate the preview cards for your site with the proper headline, summary, and image.

You should keep in mind that S3 really is an object storage. It's named as such, advertised as such, priced as such and the limitations you're hitting are because it's built as such.

It does work if you want to host a static site, and it's nice that they offer a bunch of extra niceties to help make those work... but expecting things like user-agent-specific redirects is a bit much for what's essentially a filesystem.

Amen! Have been baffled by the urge to move stuff to S3 for app hosting. I understand the convenience (sort of) and the scalability aspects (mostly) but you seem to lose loads of functionality.

It works for anything static, but anything dynamic needs to go on a server or Lambda (or possibly the API gateway).

I mean they let you put S3 behind Cloudfront with a TLS cert. Having read through all the documentation, hundreds of blog posts, etc., I've seen absolutely nothing that indicates that S3 + Cloudfront isn't meant for serious web hosting.

Do Angular sites seem to render correctly in Google Webmaster tools but they aren't actually indexed properly unless you have pre-rendered pages served? I'm curious since when I ask Google to index a specific page it shows everything properly loaded/rendered and I was under the impression that was also being indexed.

I don't really understand the advantage. Getting a small vps with nginx is fast to set up, needs very little maintenance and can handle a large amount of traffic (requesting static pages). Can't really see how S3 can be cheaper or easier.

Yes it gives some scalability, but so do many cloud providers. Digitalocean and Vultr both have SSD storage that you can attach to VMs. The speed I've seen is fast enough to easily saturate the bandwidth. Of course you'd need to scale up when you need bandwidth of more than 100mbit, but this is still cheaper than paying for AWS bandwidth and servers.

Using S3 as a web server means: managed reliability, scalability, security, maintenance, updates, https, and price efficiency (pay only if pages are visited)

Cloudfront or API gateway help you integrating with non static resources.

Bandwidth price is identical with ec2.

With lambda out there, for me ec2 is just legacy.

If i'm not wrong, cloudfront actually follows 302 redirects internally instead of passing the redirect on to the client.

but since ?_escaped_fragment_= is a suffix, not a prefix, i don't think redirection rules help.

Confusingly, _escaped_fragment_= is always a prefix if you have a #! in your url, otherwise I think it can come anywhere in the URL params.[1] Here is the exact system of redirects we were using, along with an explanation of why it didn't work:

https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/mdDouBesQwCv0za_o7GjCA/serving...

[1] https://prerender.io/js-seo/angularjs-seo-get-your-site-inde...

Ah, yes, if you use #!.

In that case, can't you do a cloudfront custom behaviour on /?_escaped_fragment_=*? I havent't tried this.