Using CloudFront only for free Amazon's ssl certificate

1
votes

I understand the free ssl certificate is not the main purpose of CloudFront. However, I am just interested what would be the negative sides of that? I am planning to do that with a Drupal website running on ec2 + rds.

I've tried with a dev site and looks like it's working fine with these settings:

Allowed HTTP Methods - GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, POST, PATCH, DELETE

Forward Headers - All

Forward Cookies - All

Query String Forwarding and Caching - Forward all, cache based on all

What could go wrong in this case?

Thank you.

1
amazon-web-servicesamazon-cloudfront
I'm not sure about drupal, but google for "cloudfront wordpress", there're wonderful articles about having static snd dunamic content together, have a look how blog.homzit.com works... that's mine :) I believe with it'll be pretty much the same. And I forgot to mention that it works like a charm! – EvgenyKolyakov
Yeah, not much articles about Drupal, but a lot about WordPress. However, many of them say I should use some plugins/modules. Would it be possible to avoid using them if I do not need to cache anything? – i15
You don't need any plugin, it's all just the cloudfront config... the only reasonable plugin there is , is to invalidate the pages automatically... but you can just set an hour of caching or less.. – EvgenyKolyakov
Awesome :) One more questions: what do I have to change to make CloudFront pass the visitor's IP? – i15
I had to set it to pass the Origin and the Host for the headers. – EvgenyKolyakov

1 Answers

3
votes

There is no issue with your current setup; but we should also consider following:

CloudFront is not free. You will be paying for bandwidth charges.

Also, you don't have to use CF.. Your EC2 instances might be behind ELB ( for high availability) ; and you can use free SSL certificate on ELB also.