How can I host my website on an EC2 Server using Apache but host my images on S3 under the same sub domain?

Question

So I have my website hosted on an EC2 server running apache. All works fine and well.

The issue I'm having is that I want my images hosted on S3 (and possibly cached on CloudFront), not on my EC2 server, but want both accessible under the same domain/subdomain.

For example say my website is www.helloworld.com . I want my images to be accessible at www.helloworld.com/images/foobar.png . I want foobar.png to be hosted on S3 and not each one of my EC2 servers though. How can I go about doing this?

Is there and configuration I can do in the AWS console or are there any rewrite rules I can use in Apache? I know I could always just set up a controller that will download the images from S3 and forward them to the user, but this seems wrong to me.

Answer 1

For that you need to put a load-balancer/proxy in front to intercept all requests and dispatch accordingly. That may not be a bad idea anyway (for availability reasons), but a separate host name for images should not be a problem, either (it's not like users will have to see or type those URL).

Answer 2

Using CloudFront, you can have CloudFront receive the initial requests, then based on the path, forward the request to either your EC2 instance or to your S3 bucket.

For example, you could setup the following:

• A CloudFront behaviour that upon a path under /images/ would use an S3 origin, and
• A default (for everything else) would go to your EC2 instance origin.