AWS CloudFront Limit Origin Access

Question

I am averaging 12,000 page views per day, but my cloudfront is getting around 6 million requests for images and fonts every day. I suppose it is possible that all of these requests are coming from my visitors, but I am having my doubts.

I know that I can enable keys and cookies so that only users of my website will be able to access the cloudfront servers, but I am not convinced yet that this is necessary.

Is there a way for me to check what percentage of the requests are from users that are being referenced from my server? Before I go and change my code to work with the private origin access?

Did you enable logging? Or look at the "top referers" report in the CloudFront console? 6M requests from 12k views seems sketchy. — Michael - sqlbot, Dec 19 '15 at 04:53
Thank you that's exactly what I was looking for, looks like its all coming from the site, or at least 97% — Hurricane Development, Dec 19 '15 at 05:26

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 19 '15 at 03:03

Don't bother micromanaging and overanalyzing. Just use the keys and cookies now because that's good practice to protect your assets and bandwidth anyway. It's an easy decision to make, and you'll not have to spend four times the effort to track abusers.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 19 '15 at 10:09

The CloudFront section of the AWS console has several reports you can view or download, including a Top Referrers Report.

The CloudFront console can display a list of the 25 domains of the websites that originated the most HTTP and HTTPS requests for objects that CloudFront is distributing for a specified distribution. These top referrers can be search engines, other websites that link directly to your objects, or your own website.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/top-referrers-report.html

You can also enable detailed logging of each individual request, which stores the logs in an S3 bucket for thorough analysis.

AWS CloudFront Limit Origin Access

2 Answers2