Use Amazon S3 Cloudfront to store images

My goal is for Drupal Cloudfront module, integrated with Imagecache module, to serve images from Amazon CloudFront CDN.  The first thing I do is look to README.txt in Drupal module folders.

See Inmagecache at admin/build/imagecache (or look for it at Site Bulding).

Get setup with AWS.  Here is the best AWS information you'll find! Deck: AWS Slideshare by Jinesh Varia  Blog: AWS Blog by Jinesh Varia  Thank you Jinesh!  Here is the place to start: AWS Management Console.  Register, and in lieu of the Inet Console -- Download Latest Release of Bucket Explorer for Amazon CloudFront (Amazon's CDN)  Amazon S3 stores data as objects within buckets. An object is a file and metadata. Images are stored on S3 with path <bucket>/preset_id_<#>/<imagefile>.  It is safe to point multiple presets at the same bucket.

Access to AWS cloud is secure with three types of credentials offered.  I'm using Drupal, I add the "Access Keys" to /default/settings.php:
$conf = array(
   'cloudfront_access_key_id' => 'AKIxxxxxxxxxxCJLJJIA',
   'cloudfront_secret_access_key' => 'mfm8ubhdwxxxxxxxxxxNBTixxGcZNFeEl9A1EMk',
);

Enable Drupal CloudFront from the Administer->Modules page.  That's it with Drupal, for a while. 

Create a S3 bucket and use AWS Cloudfront to create a "Distrubution URL".   Keep it simple for getting started, "mybucket".  On the "Distribution", leave CNAME blank, and don't require https.   Once the distribution is entered, AWS has assigned a domain name for accessing the S3 bucket.  Something like d12e0leytdskmq.cloudfront.net.  If you don't do anything more then access results in a 403 Forbidden message.  I manually uploaded an image to my bucket and entered it as the default object at the Distribution, then the URL displays that image instead of a 403 Forbidden message.

Override theme_imagecache: You can override the theme_imagecache function by placing a function called _imagecache in your theme.php file. Here's an example:

function garland_imagecache($namespace, $path, $alt = '', $title = '', $attributes = null)
   if (module_exists('cloudfront'))
    {
       return cloudview_theme_imagecache($namespace, $path, $alt, $title, $attributes);
    }
    else
    {
    return theme_imagecache($namespace, $path, $alt = '', $title = '', $attributes = null);
    }
}

If you have already overridden theme_imagecache then take a look at _cloudview_theme_imagecache in cloudview.module to see how to integrate cloudview into your function.

• Images will not be sent to s3 (and not be served through cloudfront) until this /cloudfront/processqueue url is accessed.
• Set up a cron job to hit <base_url>/cloudfront/processqueue often.
• It is safe to hit this as often as you want. If it is still processing a batch of files it will not start a second instance.