What is a proxy in AWS?

An overview

I just finished reading a great article on AWS on TechCrunch written by Mike Volpe.

It was an introduction to a service called Cloudfront that you get for free. If you want to find out more, it's a short read so I won't go into too much depth with the description of what the articles is. But the gist is that you are able to host content in front of your servers and provide different types of access controls via IP blocks that can be whitelisted. An IP block represents your internal IP's and this is what allows you to limit the access rights (RDP) that people have. So I decided it'd be interesting to compare it to another popular web content hosting service that is widely known and used in our day to day jobs, HTTP Socks, a.a proxy for web development that allows us to test live and we can also use as a production solution.

TLDR; What is a proxy? A proxy is a software/hardware component (or device depending on how you look at it) that allows us to alter the path that our traffic takes. This means we can control how a page is fetched and how the response is sent back to us. We can then add security measures, access policies, caching, compression, redirections etc.

A proxy can do anything you can imagine and for developers it isn't as obvious as most other solutions we would typically see. You see an IP of 192.168.0.100 requesting a URL. It is returned through a proxy of 10.90. Since we know a route was taken here we could use cookies, user-agent strings or the fact that both IPs and URLs are using HTTPS. All of these techniques work but what exactly is the logic behind what is being sent between them? How exactly does the flow take place? We don't really know.

When you open up a browser, there are probably around 5 to 10 hops of IP addresses between your computer and the page that opens. What we often don't know is that not only that traffic flows from machine A -> B -> C etc. But also that there is a small amount of routing/routing going on that allows a request to be picked up from different locations based on factors such as geographical location, network, load, etc.

How do I access AWS through proxy?

I want to access AWS through a third-party proxy server which passes all the.

requests through to the real host. How do I do this? I want to use S3 from my application but without the browser asking if it's ok to send the request to. I've done something similar, where I wanted the API keys on my system so they'd be safe, but I still needed the access to the rest of the AWS site. My plan was to use Squid (and SquidGuard too), which are web proxy servers and would be set up to point at Amazon's web server to go to.