How to secure you Amazon S3 connection using CloudBerry Explorer

Sometimes you store sensitive information of Amazon S3 and you don’t want it to be vulnerable while transferring it over the internet between Amazon S3 and your local computer.  Amazon S3 connection can be secured using industry-standard SSL protocol and CloudBerry Explorer helps you to take advantage of secure connections with a few clicks of the mouse.

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.4.1 and later.

Creating secure connections

With CloudBerry Explorer it could not be easier to create a secure connection.  Just check Use SSL options off when you register you new Amazon S3 account. 

You can also change one of your existing accounts to use secure connections. Just go to connection manager, select account and click edit. Then check Use SSL option off as explained above.

How to find out if you use secure connection

It could not be easier to find out if you use a secure SSL connection.  Just look at the toolbar next to the connection display name. You should see a lock icon if a current connection is secure.

 Conclusion

Security and privacy is one of the main concerns of modern internet users. There is a lot of sensitive information stored in Amazon S3 buckets both private and corporate and our users want to take extreme care of their data.  In CloudBerry Lab we respect our customer security concerns and we designed CloudBerry Explorer to help leverage Amazon S3 cloud storage not only in the easiest but also in the most secure way.  

How to enable diagnostic logging for CloudBerry S3 Explorer

Even though we are spending a lot of time to make sure the product is stable and robust, issues come up every so often. Sometimes software behaves in an unexpected and erroneous way and CloudBerry Explorer is not an exception. But we believe a hallmark of the great software company is not that the product is error free, but the way how quickly support team can react on the issue and offer a solution. CloudBerry lab is set out to offer an outstanding service even for a freeware version of S3 Explorer and we treat every customer request with the highest possible priority.

To make it easier for our customers to provide us with exhaustive information about the issue we implemented a diagnostic log, an easy way to turn it on and send to CloudBerry lab support stuff.

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer 1.4.1 and later. 

Configuring diagnostic log

To configure diagnostic log go to Tools-> Options in the program menu and go to Diagnostic and logging tab on the property pages dialog. You can set to things here Logging level and Path to the log file.

There are three logging level available.

1.       No log – no logging at all

2.       Low level – log only error codes of the responses , only ERRORs are logged

3.       High level – try to log as much information as possible

Low level is a default level

 

What information is stored in the log file

Under no account CloudBerry lab stores any sensitive customer information in the log file such as Amazon access identifiers.

We only store the data that would help us to diagnose and identify an error and as a result to help a customer.

How to view the log file and how to send it to CloudBerry lab support

To view diagnostic log go to Tools->Diagnostic in the program menu. This will open a window similar to the one on the screenshot. Here you can review diagnostic log contents and send it to support team.

Note: There is a difference between the diagnostic info that you see in on screen and the log file, which is not obvious at first sight. Diagnostic info contains general system information about your operating system and environment and a set of “in-memory” operations with all the details; log file contains logging activity depending on Logging level.)

If you click Send button it will create an email using your default mail client and put the diagnostic log in the \body of the message. All you have to do is to send an email and CloudBerry support will contact you as soon as it can.

 

What if I don’t use standalone email client?

 

If you don’t use a standalone email client and want to attach the log file to the email message using your web based email client such as Google mail or simply want to find where you log file is you can click Open n Folder button. It will open the folder where the log files are located. Basically log files are stored in the user profile.   

As you can notice a separate log file is created every day you use the product

 

One final note is that you don’t have to worry about unlimited growth of the log file.  It will be truncated automatically when it reaches a certain size. 

 

Conclusion

We are trying to make our customer experience as smooth   as possible and it is not limited to the product features, performance and usability. When it comes to communication with our support department we are set to offer an excellent service and resolve issues quickly.  Easy to set up diagnostic log is a step towards increasing our customer satisfaction. 

How to host Media Files on Amazon S3 and CloudFront with CloudBerry Explorer (part 2)

This is a second part of our article on how to host content of your website on Amazon S3.  In this post we will discuss the advantages of storing media content of your website using Amazon CloudFront service and how CloudBerry Explorer can help.

Overview

If you want to learn how to get your Amazon S3 account you can read our previous post here .  I also highly recommend reading the first part of this article that explains why you may want to host your media content on Amazon S3 and how to do that with CloudBerry Explorer.

In this article we will go beyond that and explain how you can configure Amazon CloudFront distributions for S3 buckets and setup CNAMEs for CloudFront distributions.

If you don’t have Amazon S3 account just yet it takes just a couple of minutes to create one. We have a special blog post about it that you can find here . You can download CloudBerry Explorer freeware S3 client here

What is Amazon CloudFront

CloudFront is another Amazon service that works in conjunction with S3 and allows for efficient content distribution. The content is published to data centers in multiple geographical zones and the user download content from the server that requires fewer network hops. All these happen transparently to the end user and the publisher pay a small per usage base fee.

Note that you have to sign-up for Amazon CloudFront service separately to be able to use it.

Creating CloudFront Distribution

Let’s assume that we want to use a bucket called cimages to store our media files. A good thing about CloudFront distributions is that it doesn’t have any limitations as to how you name your bucket. So any valid bucket name will work just fine.  

If you are wondering what valid buckets name are you can check Amazon S3 documentation here

To create a distribution select a bucket and click Distribution button on the toolbar.

This will take you to the dialog where you will have to click create link

This will take you to another dialog where you can specify CNAMEs for your distribution, in our example it will be images.mysite.com, optional comment, and don’t forget to check the Enable Distribution checkbox.  Click ok to create a distribution.

 

At this point Amazon will propagate the content from you S3 bucket to servers in multiple geographical locations. It may take some time.

Configuring CNAMEs

As in the part one it is likely you want to refer to your images using the nice URL like

http://media.mysite.com /Picture004.jpg

And just like before all you have to do is to configure appropriate CNAME in your hosting provider control panel. I use 1&1 but every hosting provider offers a way to create CNAMEs and you will just have to find out the details.  

Configuring CNAMEs for CloudFront distributions is a little different.  First you have to find the correct alias. Go to the properties screen for a bucket configured for CloudFront distribution and find Domain Name property. Copy the URL.

 

Go to your hosting provider control panel (I use 1&1 for this example) and enter your distribution domain name as an alias for your domain (images.mysite.com for our example).

 

It usually takes some time for DNS configuration to take effect, so the changes will not be available immediately.

Generating URLs with CNAME

 

Specifying CNAMEs for CloudFront enabled bucket is a little easier than for regular S3 buckets.  Open the Web URL dialog box that you are already familiar with. Now you can see that there is a drop down list with several options.  You can choose

Origin URL – the URL of S3 bucket itself. It is very unlikely that you should want to use it as you will lose the benefits of CloudFront and you media content will be served from a regular S3 bucket.

Domain name – automatically assigned domain to your CloudFront distribution. Use this one if you don’t have CNAME configured.

CNAME – this is your actual CNAME that you’ve just configured. This is actually the one that you want to use.

 

That’s it. Now you are ready to update your html code with new URLs and improve the scalability of your web server and serve your media content faster by taking advantage of Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront services.

 

How much faster my media content will be served if I enable CloudFront

This is a valid question. Even though I didn’t make my own research there are numerous of blog posts around the internet, showing how fast the content is served from CloudFront edge servers. I will refer to the blog posts made by Jason Byrne Cloudfront is Simply Marvelous and Cloudfront is Still 34x Faster than S3 Alone!

Jason’s experiment shows that CloudFront is 34 times faster than when you serve images from S3 and 14 times faster than his web server.  

 

Conclusion

As you could see Amazon S3 in particular coupled with CloudFront offers a great solution for hosting your media content while decreasing the load of your primary web server and serving the content in extremity fast fashion. There are some obvious advantages including pay as you go model and unlimited scalability. On the other hand CloudBerry Explorer freeware can help copy files to S3 account, create CloudFront distributions, configure your files to be accessible by web browser and automate the whole process. 

What’s new in CloudBerry Explorer 1.4 for Amazon S3

CloudBerry Lab is celebrating 3 year anniversary of Amazon S3 service and we are proud to serve almost half million community of users.  To share our excitement we decided to release our 1.4 version at the very same day of the 3^rd years.

So, what new in this release?

• All tasks run in background including ACL
• Generate BiTorrent URLs
• Generate short URLs using http://chilp.it
• Hide to tray

Let me go thru them one by one.

All tasks run in background including ACL

 

It was a tedious task to change ACL for multiple objects as it would hang up the console with a modal window and you basically have nothing to do but to stare at the process or you can work with another program while ACLs are applied.  Now this task is performed in the queue, you can watch the status in the queue while working on other S3 tasks.  What’s more you can now hide the program to tray – see below.

Generate BiTorrent URLs

 

Generating BiTorrent URLs is really nothing special in terms of the feature, but it is one of the Amazon S3 features and we hope some users will find it a useful addition to the product.  It basically adds “?torrent “ to the end of the URL and we hope it will save a couple of seconds typing it manually for those who want to use BiTorrent URLs.

Generating short URLs using Chilp.it

Amazon s3 URLs could be quite long if you use long keys. What’s more if you generate a signed URL it will get even longer. Many times I found myself using a URL shortening service to reduce a URL before sending it out. Then it occurred to use that this process could be automated. We decided to integrate with http://chilp.it/ URL shortening service. We already had a very positive experience with these guys when integrating it into our Twitter browser plug-ins . They have always been very responsive and get our requests in a couple of days.

Compare yourself. The first screen shows the regular signed URL. Imagine how easy it is to lose one of the symbols and make the URL invalid.

Now look at the very same URL but shortened. Cool, isn’t it?

 

Hiding CloudBerry Explorer to try

 

This is my favorite.  CloudBerry Explorer users have been asking us to be able to hide the product to tray when it is performing some tasks such as copying files.   It will even report you the task status if you mouse over the icon, so that you can see if you have any running tasks at the moment.

 

By default when you minimize the program main window it will hide to tray, but if you want to change this behavior there is a new option available in the Tools->options on the general tab.

Looking ahead

We are aimed to make Amazon S3 and CloudFront services easier to use. We know that many of you are developers of the solutions that are based on those services and we see our tool complementary to your own solutions.   One of the things we are going to work on for the next release is to make our copy queue feature more flexible and robust.  For instance we will offer an option to retry failed tasks.

 Another area where we will work is the ability to copy a path from the navigation bar. In other words, when you click to the navigation bar it will become editable and you will be able to copy the path.

 

Conclusion

CloudBerry Explorer freeware is a tool that makes managing Amazon S3 easy. This is further proved with its ability to turn on S3 bucket logging, the task that you can complete in the less than a minute. You can download CloudBerry Explorer freeware on our website at http://cloudberrylab.com/