How to serve private S3 content from a CloudFront private distribution via signed expiring Urls

For this walk-through, you’ll need the most excelent CloudBerry S3 Explorer. Somehow, these guys manage to support in the UI more stuff than Amazon itself does in its management console . And you only need the free version.

So first the requirements:

1. You want to have full control of who and for how long accesses the S3 payloads/objects.
2. You want to automatically leverage Amazon’s CloudFront CDN so that customers get the fastest downloads

So here’s how to go about it:

1. Create a new bucket in S3 that will serve as the origin for CloudFront. At this point, unless you specify something different, the bucket is private.
2. In the CloudBerry S3 Explorer, right-click the bucket, and select CloudFront –> New CloudFront Distribution Wizard
• Choose the kind of delivery for the payloads. In my case, I just picked Download....

Read full article