Amazon CloudFront announces support for Origin Failover

Starting today, you can enable Origin Failover for your Amazon CloudFront distributions to improve the availability of content delivered to your end users.

With CloudFront’s Origin Failover capability, you can setup two origins for your distributions - primary and secondary, such that your content is served from your secondary origin if CloudFront detects that your primary origin is unavailable. CloudFront already allows you to configure custom error pages or generate redirects with Lambda@Edge if your origin is unavailable. Now with Origin Failover, you can easily setup failover logic between combinations of AWS origins or non-AWS custom HTTP origins such that there is minimal interruption to your viewer’s experience. For example, you can have two Amazon S3 buckets that serve as your origin, that you independently upload your content to. If an object that CloudFront requests from your primary bucket is not present or if connection to your primary bucket times-out, CloudFront will request the object from your secondary bucket. So, you can configure CloudFront to trigger a failover in response to either HTTP 4xx or 5xx status codes.

There is no additional fee for using this feature. To learn more about how Origin Failover works on CloudFront, please read our Developer Guide or visit our web page to get started.