Cloudfront and EC2
How do you setup Cloudfront in front of an EC2 instance? I'm interested in having users hit the Cloudfront url rather than the EC2 origin.
So instead of hitting ec2-52-64-xxx-xxx.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com users would hit d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net.
My intention is to save money on hosting by reducing the traffic and CPU load on the EC2 instance, while providing overseas users with faster load times.
Would I just point my DNS to the Cloudfront url instead of the EC2 origin?
Answer
Would I just point my DNS to the Cloudfront url instead of the EC2 origin?
Pretty much.
Technically, you don't point DNS to a URL, you point it to a hostname or to an IP address, which is done a little differently with CloudFront.
First, though... in the CloudFront distribution settings, you need to configure any hostnames that CloudFront should expect to see sent by the browser, in the "alternate domain names" box.
For the origin, enter the ec2-...-compute.amazonaws.com hostname.
At this point, after 10-15 minutes, visiting the CloudFront-assigned URL should take you to your server.
Next... if your DNS is hosted in Route 53, then you'd go to the hosted zone and create new "A" records for those hostnames, setting "Alias" to "Yes," which should cause the targets box to be populated with the CloudFront distribution, which you would then select, and save the record.
If your DNS isn't hosted by Route 53, you would instead create CNAME records in DNS, pointing to the hostname assigned to the CloudFront distribution, e.g. jozxyqkexample.cloudfront.net. The catch, here, is that you can't do this with the apex/root of your domain, because a CNAME isn't valid there... so www.example.com would work, but example.com will not. This is a limitation of DNS, and the only workaround is to use Route 53 for your DNS, because it has internal integration with CloudFront (hence the "Alias" records, mentioned above, which use internal lookups rather than external referrals, like a CNAME).
You may also want to configure CloudFront to forward the Host header back to the origin server; otherwise when the request arrives, the hostname presented to your server in the HTTP requests will not be your domain name, and instead will be the hostname you configured as the origin host.
Be sure, when you connect through CloudFront, that the server doesn't redirect you back to the EC2 hostname or IP (the address bar in the browser will change, if it does, and you'll want to fix your web server's config if that happens).