Setting cache for already uploaded amazon s3 files

Firstly, the point of Cloudfront is to serve cached content - if you try to serve uncached content from Cloudfront it is slower than serving it directly from S3, in almost all cases (something like streaming content would be the exception). Consider for a moment what needs to happen to serve content from Cloudfront - it needs to be retrieved from the origin server to a location that is geographically close to the user - which means that for a request where Cloudfront has to retrieve content from the origin server, you add extra latency into the request, and the user receives content slower. It is only once the content is available at the edge location that subsequent requests are faster.

The best approach to this problem is to change your filenames when you update a page - this will force Cloudfront to retrieve the new content. Again, keep in mind that Cloudfront is typically used for media files (including images) and style/javascript - and not so much for html. Esssentially, you would have your HTML on S3, and your images on Cloudfront - with any changes you make, you can change the name of the file on Cloudfront (e.g. file-v1.jpg, file-v2.jpg, etc). Another common way is including a query string with version information.

Also, keep in mind that Cloudfront does not serve gzipped content - which may result in a slower response than from a regular server (although, in your case, S3 doesn't identify gzip capable browsers either).

Finally, if you want to, you can use invalidation to force Cloudfront to discard its existing copy and fetch a new one from the origin server. Note, however, that Cloudfront gives you only 1000 free invalidations per month, after which the cost is $0.005/invalidation.

The lowest time Cloudfront will keep content is 1hr, although, the default is 24hr. I'd therefore try to set the max-age to at least 3600. Consider also an s-maxage header (for shared - i.e. proxied content). Amazon recommends this caching tutorial.

There was a recent problem with this, rectified a few days ago

Regarding your question #4:

You can mount S3 bucket as a local partition and work with S3 files as they were located on your server's filesystem. There are a number of good Open Source tools available.

But from my side I would recommend you to take a look at my project: RioFS, a userspace filesystem to mount Amazon S3 buckets. Project's goals and the main advantages comparing to other similar tools are: simplicity, the speed of operations and a bugs-free code.

Currently the project is in the “beta” state, but it's been running on several high-loaded fileservers for quite some time (RioFS provides there an access to S3 located files to ftp / sftp servers).

We are building a community around our project and are seeking for more people to join our project to discuss future plans and help with the testing. From our side we offer a quick bugs fix and will listen to your requests to add new features.

A quick how-to:

You could mount a bucket using the following command (assuming you have installed RioFS and have exported AWSACCESSKEYID and AWSSECRETACCESSKEY environment variables):

riofs http://s3.amazonaws.com your_bucket_name /path/to/localfolder

(please refer to project's description and run riofs --help to get help with command line arguments)

Please note that the project is still in the development, there could be still a number of bugs left. If you find that something doesn't work as expected: please fill an issue report on the project's GitHub page.

Hope it helps and we are looking forward to seeing you joined our community !