Amazon CloudFront and EC2: Global Load Balancing
- by Matt Rogish
We have an app that is going to store and serve up a decent amount of data in S3 to a global audience where latency should be minimized. So, we've been doing tests with Amazon CloudFront and have seen favorable results.
However, we need a thin middleware layer (to do security etc.) and we'd like to put that in EC2. Due to security restrictions, this middleware layer will do the file streaming from S3/CloudFront:
S3/CloudFront - EC2 - Clients
We can geographically distribute the EC2 nodes (US East/West, and Ireland) but the problem is that a client in the EU would hit our US server and be fed data from there, thus rendering much of the performance benefit of CloudFront moot. I've been digging through the EC2 docs but I can't find a built-in way to get a geographically distributed version of EC2 a la CloudFront.
Elastic Load Balancing sounds like the way to go, but I can't seem to find a way with that to direct based on routing... Preferably, we'd like to keep the amount of stuff outside of EC2/S3/etc. to a minimum (for obvious reasons).
Any ideas how to do that within the EC2/S3 framework? DNS/routing tricks?
Thanks!
