Question 71902 in Amazon Web Sevices Question posted in
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Cloudfront Edge functions – Amazon web services

I’m trying to play Instagram Video assets. The challenge is the videos are expirable. They expire every N mins.

I’m brainstorming a solution where I set up my CDN (Cloudfront) which forwards the incoming requests to the original server (Instagram in this case), caches the video at CDN, and then keeps serving it without the need to request Instagram again. I don’t want to download the videos and keep them in my bucket.

I’d a look at CloudFront functions and was able to redirect the incoming requests to another URL, basis on some conditions. Following is the code.

function handler(event) {
    var request = event.request;
    var headers = request.headers;
    
    if request.uri == '/assets/1.jpg'{
        var newurl = 'https://instagram.com/media/1.jpg'
      
        var response = {
            statusCode: 302,
            statusDescription: 'Found',
            headers:
                { "location": { "value": newurl } }
        }

        return response;
     }
   return request
}

However, this redirects it to the newURL. What I’m looking for is not a redirect, but the following

  1. when the request is made to my server CDN, ie mydomain.com/assets/1.jpg, the file 1.jpg should be served from the Instagram server, whose value is the newURL in the above code snippet. This should be done without changing my domain URL (in the address bar) to Instagram.

  2. The following requests to mydomain.com/assets/1.jpg should be directly served from the cache, and should not be routed again to Instagram.

Any help in this regard is highly appreciated.

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2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Spoke to the AWS team directly. This is what they responded.

    From the case description, I understand you're attempting to set up a CloudFront distribution that forwards incoming requests to the original server (Instagram in this case), caches the video at CDN, and then continues to serve it without the need to request Instagram again, and you've also stated that you don't want to store the videos in an S3 bucket. If I've misunderstood your concern, kindly correct me.

    Using the internal tools, I could see that the origin for the CloudFront distribution is an S3 bucket. Since you have mentioned in your concern that you want the requests coming to your distribution to be forwarded to the origin, in this case Instagram to serve the video assets from there, you can make use of Custom origins in CloudFront for this. Most CloudFront features are supported when you use a custom origin except for private content. For CloudFront to access the custom origin, the origin must remain publicly accessible. See [1].

    With this in mind, I attempted to recreate the situation in which "Instagram" can be set as the custom origin for a CloudFront distribution. I used "www.instagram.com " as my origin, and when I tried to access the CF distribution, I received a "5xx Server Error," implying that Instagram is not allowed to be configured as an origin. Unfortunately, due to the configurations of the origin (Instagram), you will not be able to serve content from Instagram without first storing it in your S3 bucket. Using CloudFront and S3, you can serve video content as described in this document [2]

    Another workaround is to use redirection, which can be accomplished by using S3 Bucket's Static website hosting property or Lambda@Edge functions [3,4]. This method does not require you to store the content in an S3 bucket to serve it, since you mentioned in your correspondence that you want to serve the Instagram content from your cache and do not want the requests forwarded to Instagram again, this method is also not possible. When you redirect your CloudFront requests to a new website, a new request is generated to the origin to serve the content, and CloudFront is removed from the picture. Because CloudFront is not involved, it will not be able to cache the content, and every time a request is made, it will directly hit the origin server, i.e. Instagram's servers. Kindly note that, since Instagram is a third-party tool, unless you have the access to use it as a CloudFront origin, CloudFront will not be able to cache it's content.

    References: [1] Using Amazon EC2 (or another custom origin): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/DownloadDistS3AndCustomOrigins.html [2] Tutorial: Hosting on-demand streaming video with Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/tutorial-s3-cloudfront-route53-video-streaming.html [3] (Optional) Configuring a webpage redirect: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/how-to-page-redirect.html [4] Handling Redirects@Edge Part 1: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/handling-redirectsedge-part1/


  2. 0

    I’m afraid LambdaEdge will not help here, however you may use Custom Origin in your CloudFront behavior with your custom cache policy to meet N mins TTL requirement. In case you familiar with CDK then please have a look at HttpOrigin. CloudFront distribution can look like below:

    new cloudfront.Distribution(this, 'myDist', {
  defaultBehavior: {
    origin: new origins.HttpOrigin('www.instagram.com'),
    cachePolicy: new cloudfront.CachePolicy(this, 'myCachePolicy', {
      cachePolicyName: 'MyPolicy',
      comment: 'A default policy',
      defaultTtl: Duration.minutes(N)
    }),
  },
});
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