Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Resources

Articles you need to read

• Coding Horror: Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service
  This is the article that launched 1000 S3 Accounts. Read it and you'll want to move all your images offsite!
• Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site
  The developers at Yahoo! are smarter than you. They say you should move your static content out to S3. You should listen to them.
• How to do all that website optimizing stuff that Yahoo recommends if you're running ASP.NET and storing your content at Amazon S3
  A little hand-holding for the C# developer that wants to make their website load fast like Yahoo! says it should.

Useful tools for Amazon S3

• Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer(S3Fox)
  The original file management tool for Amazon S3. Chances are you have it already.
• Bucket Explorer - A user interface for Amazon S3
  A little bit better option if you're dealing with lots of file transfer operations by hand. These guys are very responsive to feedback. If you ask for something, they'll probably deliver it in the next version.
• CloudBerry S3 Explorer
  Another option for managing your S3 buckets. The Free version is super powerful, and does things like managing Cloudfront distributions, setting up Server Access Logging, and letting you specify custom headers for your files (which is useful if you're using S3/Cloudfront as a Content Delivery Network).

Want to do it the hard way?

Amazon provides developer APIs that allow you to spend several frustrating days reinventing the wheel so that you don't have to sign up for S3STAT. Here are some helpful articles and links to get you started:

• Code on the Road: Roll your own Web Stats for Amazon S3
  A step-by-step tutorial to duplicate the functionality of S3STAT
• logmerge
  A tool to combine an arbitrary number of common logfile or Amazon S3 web logs into a single file
• Server Access Logging Setup Tutorial
  From the Amazon S3 site
• Server Access Log Format
  This is the format that Amazon's detailed logs come in
• Common Logfile Format & Combined Logfile Format
  These are the formats that you'll need to translate your logs to before you can run them through a log analyzer.