CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that speeds up content delivery by caching copies closer to users. It also allows fine-grained control over who can access content. In this Cloud Lab, you’ll explore how CloudFront signed URLs can protect premium or restricted content.
You’ll start by configuring an S3 bucket to host content and apply a bucket policy to restrict access to CloudFront only. Next, you’ll create a CloudFront distribution and a trusted key group. You’ll then use Python and the AWS CLI to generate signed URLs to control access to specific objects. Finally, you’ll test access to verify that only signed URLs can retrieve the protected content.
After completing this Cloud Lab, you can securely serve private content using signed URLs, a pattern commonly used for paid or authenticated access scenarios. This skill is useful in media delivery, paywalled content platforms, and secure file-sharing applications.
The following is the high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure that we will create in this Cloud Lab:
