Bucket name does matter on AWS S3

Scope

As some of you might know I have a second career as a photographer, and it is just natural for me to write my own website (Bootstrapped indeed!!). Currently having some issues with the existing web hosting so I began to migrate my site to be hosted in Amazon S3.

Migration Began

Went through the Web UI interface on AWS portal to upload files, set permission and enabled Static Website Hosting. All nice and sweet, had some issues to apply all public read policy to the bucket so I don't have to change permission per file basis. Once again, it wasn't difficult to find out how when we are in that era of information technology, a bit of search and I got the policy example up and running.

For those who curious here the code I have used. Version date cannot be changed or it will throw error. Why 2008???

   1: {

   2: "Version":"2008-10-17",

   3: "Id":"http referer policy example",

   4: "Statement":[

   5: {

   6: "Sid":"readonly policy",

   7: "Effect":"Allow",

   8: "Principal":"*",

   9: "Action":"s3:GetObject",

  10: "Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::mybucket/*"

  11: }

  12: ]

  13: }

What really got me and wasn't so obvious to me is that the bucket name is directly related to the domain I am going to use for CNAME redirect. What does it mean? Let's have a look.

At first I setup the bucket as "swphotography" as below.



After I change my CNAME record in my DNS register, I get the error below.



With my given endpoint from s3, the site works fine without 404 error.

The error message was actually quite useful, especially the 2nd and 3rd lines helped me to resolve the problem.

The 2nd line is basically saying "bucket not found", and the 3rd line is saying BucketName: www.sunnyw.net.

Bucket Name Matters!!

Hello S3, I didn't setup the bucket name as www.sunnyw.net, it was swphotography! It had me thinking maybe the bucket name is related to the url, and maybe it uses it as a way to do bucket look up.



Copy the files over from the swphotography bucket to the www.sunnyw.net bucket, my site is up and running again!

Conclusion

It was a bit of effort but pretty happy with the result. As my usual whinging thing, perhaps they can provide a wizard tool for people who want to use CDN for static website hosting? It is not an uncommon strategy to host simple content sites and you may find articles about it on the internet easily. Extra bedside reading anyone?