Improved support for AWS S3 and Cloudfront transfers

[The Old Man]

Re AWS S3 and Cloudfront, please could you add the option to leave content on the local server, so that copies are transferred/created on S3?

If you don't have versioning enabled on the S3 bucket and something goes wrong, you can lose so much content and it's rocket science to try to find out what failed and why from AWS logs. I had an issue where I kept finding assets/objects disappearing from AWS and I ended up losing 100's of Gallery Images although I have backup originals. If I still retained the original files on the source server, I could have just re-uploaded any that were missing. Better logs and error messages would be great.

The rather excellent W3TotalCache plug-in for Wordpress has for example some useful Tools for CDNs and Buckets: 

• a clear alert button if files failed to sync which takes you to...
• a simplistic but effective multi-tool called Unsuccessful file transfer queue. This tool lists number and details of the pending file uploads and deletions. A second option shows the Delete Queue and a third shows the Purge queue. The tool displays a table with headings for Local Path, Remote Path, Last Error, Date/Time and an optional Delete button for each row.

Another good Wordpress plug-in that supports Cloudfront and S3 is WP Offload S3 Lite, which has some useful tools and options like being able to list your buckets in the settings configuration so you can see if it's connected properly after you have entered your keys, and quickly select the bucket you need as well as choose to copy files instead of moving them to S3, ideal for extra redundancy.

There are handy preview links so you can see if a file image is available via the S3 url and Cloudfront CDN url, which are handy for set up testing.

 

 

 

 

 

[Sirmadsen]

On the topic of S3, maybe implement support for multipart uploads?

[The Old Man]

Aside from the obvious option to COPY files from IPS instead of automatically MOVING them to S3, I'd really like the option NOT to set every object/file to Public, as once discovered bots and users can bypass the CDN, direct S3 access is more costly.

[Summit360]

@The Old Man I raised this and offered a fix, it wasn't taken up. It might be something you can do with s3 perms out of the box now.

 

[The Old Man]

Thanks Summit, I'm really disappointed there was no official response from IPS about this in your topic or here in this one. I can understand it with insignificant sites like mine, but it must be a concern for the large enterprises that use S3 and Cloudfront.