Understanding the Difference between S3 Presigned URL and CloudFront Signed URL
In the world of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a variety of storage and content delivery services. One of these services is Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), which is a highly scalable, reliable, and low-cost object storage service. Another service is Amazon CloudFront, which is a content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up the distribution of static and dynamic web content, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.
In this blog post, we will be discussing two important concepts in AWS: S3 Presigned URL and CloudFront Signed URL. Both of these concepts allow us to securely distribute content from S3 or CloudFront, but they each serve a different purpose and have different use cases.
S3 Presigned URL
An S3 Presigned URL is a URL that we can provide to others to securely download content from an S3 bucket, without exposing the S3 bucket’s AWS access key. This URL contains an expiration time and a signature that grants temporary access to the object in S3. The recipient of the URL can use it to retrieve the object until the URL expires.
Use Case: An S3 Presigned URL is useful when we want to share an object stored in S3 with someone else, but don’t want to make the object publicly accessible. This is a common use case for sharing confidential files with a limited group of people.
CloudFront Signed URL
A CloudFront Signed URL is a URL that we can provide to others to securely access content stored in a CloudFront distribution. Like an S3 Presigned URL, it contains an expiration time and a signature that grants temporary access to the object in CloudFront. The recipient of the URL can use it to retrieve the object until the URL expires.
Use Case: A CloudFront Signed URL is useful when we want to share content stored in CloudFront with someone else, but we don’t want to make the content publicly accessible. This is a common use case for sharing confidential files with a limited group of people, or for controlling access to video or audio content.
In short, S3 Presigned URL and CloudFront Signed URL are two important concepts in AWS that allow us to securely distribute content from S3 and CloudFront, respectively. While both serve similar purposes, they have different use cases and should be used accordingly.
