Amazon
CloudFront
was designed to make it really easy to distribute content to users at high speed
with low latency. Here are some new tools which provide a nice end-user interface
to CloudFront.
The newest Freeware release of the
CloudBerry Explorer
now includes CloudFront support. You can create and manage distributions,
assign CNAMES, and even
automate the entire process using the
Windows PowerShell. CloudBerry Explorer also includes some powerful support for
batched changes to S3 object Access Control Lists.
There are a couple of helpful videos here.
StreamInCloud is a free
FLV (Flash Video) encoder.
You simply create an S3 bucket and give StreamInCloud permission to read and
write it. It then monitors the bucket for new videos, encodes them into
the FLV format, and places the encoded version in the bucket. Of course, if
the bucket is part of a CloudFront distribution, the encoded content
is then available worldwide at high speed with low latency.
StreamInCloud encodes the videos at 512kbps and leaves the size as-is.
This service is free; an advanced version with additional features and options will
be available later at an additional charge.
Cyberduck is a Mac OS X client for
Amazon S3 and
CloudFront, with added support for
FTP, SFTP, WebDav, and other online storage facilities. The product has a very long
feature list, is
«scriptable via AppleScript,
and, like CloudBerry Explorer, is Freeware.
Full source code is available as well.
As I noted earlier this week, Ylastic
allows you to manage your CloudFront distributions
from your iPhone.
There’s now support for the Google Android Phone as well.
Watch the screencasts to learn more.
Affirma Consulting has developed the
Manager For Amazon CloudFront
in
C#. The project is
hosted on CodePlex and full source code
is available. It supports direct streaming of data into S3 and uses multiple threads to manage
simultaneous uploads, downloads, and live statistics.
On the surface,
CloudBuddy
looks like a free S3 bucket explorer tool with full support for CloudFront.
However, there’s quite a bit more beneath the surface. It is actually a
platform with a highly refined
architecture.
All CloudBuddy operations are exposed as
APIs.
The distribution includes a
Microsoft Office
plug-in to help you to manage your documents,
workbooks, emails, presentations, and projects in the cloud.
Source code
is available.
Bucket Explorer also has a number of unique and very handy features including the ability
to copy objects from one S3 account to another along with
timed backups to S3. It is available
for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Enjoy, and let us know how you have put CloudFront to use.
— Jeff;
