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Can you really overload S3? Also how long is the expiration time of CloudFront?

I'm guessing they misspoke or misattributed their usage of CloudFront to protect S3. It's almost certainly used for predictable performance, since S3 is measurably worst in that respect.

Cloudfront's default is 24 hours unless you specify otherwise

As of launch day, we started specifying a 5 minute cache time:

https://github.com/GSA/analytics.usa.gov#deploying-the-app

We might increase that over time, but having fixes take effect within 5 minutes while the site is under the spotlight is a nice thing.

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