AWS needs a rewrite engine in Cloudfront

03/20/13 23:40:00    

By Michael Mealling

Since I updated Rocketforge to use Amazon's S3 and Middleman back in January I have been moving all of my websites to that same configuration. It has worked extremely well with one exception: rewrites and redirects. There is still no solution to the “Creating redirects for query string parameters in AWS S3” problem.

AWS should build a simple service that integrates with Cloudfront and S3 that can intercept and rewrite/redirect URLs of any type. This would allow for many very very useful use cases:

1) Rewrite to “data:” URLs for even faster page loads of certain small assets

2) Migration of existing sites with query parameter based URLs to move and still maintain old links

3) Seemlessly integrate static and dynamic content by forwarding paths to apps and vice versa

4) Enable instantaneous deploy and rollback of service updates

As it stands I'm having to build my own version by creating a micro instance and having nginx run as a proxy to S3 with URL rewrites and then have Cloudfront sit in front of that. This is probably such a common setup that AWS should just replicate it.