(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Amazon Web Services’ (aws.amazon.com) content delivery solution, CloudFront, currently requires that content be publicly readable by anyone on the Internet, however, a new proposal gives hope to those who want detailed control over who can download private content.
According to a post by Amazon’s CloudFront Team in its developer forum, it is requesting input from customers, who would be interested in Access Control List features that let users control who can access their content, much like Amazon S3, which lets users extend permissions (such as read or write) to objects to users via their individual AWS account. To reach end-users, CloudFront users can generate pre-signed URLs, which let users leave ACLs on objects that can only be accessed in Amazon S3, but then generate pre-signed URLs that can be shared with an end-user so they can access the content, within a specified period of time.
Pre-signed URLs would let CloudFront deliver a digital asset you’ve sold online (such as a photo, movie or mp3), or use it to distribute objects only to company employees.
Amazon has recently been trying to make its shared cloud offerings increasingly appealing to users who need to restrict content. In August, it unveiled the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (aws.amazon.com/vpc/), which lets enterprises connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated compute resources via a virtual private network connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources.
