I woke up last Sunday morning and was browsing through my network. I saw someone looking for help with the title "CDN Problem Loading Files from AWS CloudFront". I thought to myself hey I can solve this one. We do all our deployment through CloudFront on AWS.
So I contacted Jody (Head of Technology @ Heathand ) and he gave me an account of the problem he was facing. He was thorough with the problem and it was odd. We discussed the configurations to be sure. I was curious 🤔 why he was working on a Sunday evening (GMT +11). He had to deliver the environment this week he told me. I got down to work after my Sunday breakfast.
The technical part
It should have worked in a normal scenario. It seemed like the CDN was causing the issue because it worked without the CDN. I looked into the server, checked the front end configuration files, CDN configuration along with S3. Did some A/B Testing with URLs. We tested with/without CDN to rule out server-side issues. This helped me localize the problem and finally together with Jody we concluded it was a fronted end configuration issue as it did not accept a certain type of file over the network.
After 5 hours of digging through configurations, servers, S3, EC2, and different dev and UAT environment we closed the issue 😅. Jody was pleased with the effort. He was with me all along the way. And gave the following review which made my day. 😎
“This was quite a difficult problem that in the end was caused by my front-end developer and really required his input to solve properly. Deepak managed to identify the problem and point me in the right direction as well as supply a work-around until the proper configuration files could be supplied by the original developer.” - Jody Biddle - Head of Technology - Health &
