Alfa Jango Blog Engineering, Software, and Entrepreneurship

This is Article #4 of a 4-part series. For a good primer, check out the first two articles listed below. For the reasoning and analysis behind the “Recommended” option in this article, check out Part 3, How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads. Otherwise, jump right in!

• The Importance of Page Load Speed
• Improve Page Load Speed (by 80%) by Improving Component Load Speed
• How to Combine GZip + CDN for Fastest Page Loads
• Caching, Zipping, and (Amazon CloudFront) CDN For A Rails App
  • Prerequisites
    1. Cached stylesheets and javascripts
    2. Creating an Amazon AWS Account
  • Setup S3 Buckets
  • Setup CloudFront Distributions
  • Create CNAME records (optional)
  • Install Rails S3 Synch Plugin
    1. Installing AWS-S3 Gem
    2. Configure S3 Synch Plugin
    3. Add S3 Synch to Deployment
  • Option A: Compressible Assets from App Server, Images from CloudFront (recommended)
    1. Configure Rails Asset Host
    2. Create A-name Record
    3. Configure Apache
  • Option B: Serve Everything from CloudFront (easier, but not recommended)
    1. Configure Rails Asset Host
    2. Pre-compile Cached Stylesheet and Javascript File
  • Conclusion