I Setup My Own Personal CDN Using Cloudflare and S3

Article reads more like "I became a user of Cloudflare's CDN" than "I setup my own personal CDN"; perhaps I'm missing the point though?!

If you want to survive a spike of traffic from something like HN a simple way to do it is to run your site behind something like Cloudflare and set each page to cache for a short period of time.

Cloudflare implements a dog pile prevention mechanism where if ten simultaneous requests come in for the same page they will make only a single request to the backend, so even just a few seconds of cache time can absorb a huge amount of traffic.

Since my blog rarely updates I use a 15 minute cache time and manually purge the Cloudflare cache when I modify a blog entry. I've survived quite a few high traffic incidents that way.

You should really be using an OAI to let cloudfront get your content, serve out of there with a local cache policy..

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...

Open bucket is an antipattern here.

I'm just going to go ahead and threadjack here with a CDN question since the article isn't all that informative.

What's the best way to utilize a service like Cloudfront or Cloudflare when you need low latency access to static files that aren't getting a lot of traffic? I'd pay more for a service that lets me serve 12kb-10MB files with <50ms latency on Cloudflare edge nodes but some of them are only going to be accessed once a day or less. My understanding is that most of the time these files would just fall out of the edge cache. There'd still be the advantage of going through Cloudflare/Cloudfront's private network but I'm still going to be limited by S3's latency.

You don’t even need the S3 Bucket... Cloudflare will work as a transparent proxy and will cache all static assets.

If you're using S3, what's wrong with Cloudfront?

tl;dr for anyone ever needing to use S3 as a website:

- S3 bucket w/ same name as domain.

- CNAME to bucket

- OR enable static website hosting, CNAME to your bucket's website dns name provided by AWS.

- Done, just make sure CF is proxying not doing pass-thru.

- PS, permissions need to allow public read of your data, of course.