Amazon-web-services – Force CloudFront distribution/file update

Here is how I do it using the CloudFront control panel.

1. Select CloudFront from the list of services.
2. Make sure Distributions from the top left is selected.
3. Next click the link for the associated distribution from the list (under id).

4. Select the Invalidations tab.
5. Click the Create Invalidation button and enter the location of the files you want to be invalidated (updated).

For example:

6. Then click the Invalidate button and you should now see InProgress under status.

It usually takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete your invalidation request, depending on the size of your request.

Once it says completed you are good to go.

Tip: Once you have created a few invalidations if you come back and need to invalidate the same files use the select box and the Copy link will become available making it even quicker.

UPDATE: Amazon now supports gzip compression, so this is no longer needed. Amazon Announcement

Original answer:

The answer is to gzip the CSS and JavaScript files. Yes, you read that right.

gzip -9 production.min.css

This will produce production.min.css.gz. Remove the .gz, upload to S3 (or whatever origin server you're using) and explicitly set the Content-Encoding header for the file to gzip.

It's not on-the-fly gzipping, but you could very easily wrap it up into your build/deployment scripts. The advantages are:

1. It requires no CPU for Apache to gzip the content when the file is requested.
2. The files are gzipped at the highest compression level (assuming gzip -9).
3. You're serving the file from a CDN.

Assuming that your CSS/JavaScript files are (a) minified and (b) large enough to justify the CPU required to decompress on the user's machine, you can get significant performance gains here.

Just remember: If you make a change to a file that is cached in CloudFront, make sure you invalidate the cache after making this type of change.