We don’t worry about updates to files at Dopplr: we just generate a new ID every time we change any image (and therefore a new URL), and update our pointer to it in the database. The old versions can be cleaned up from S3 from time to time using a batch job, and we know that everyone is always seeing the latest version.

For new content I have seen that connects to S3, gets data, and distributed.

But when trying to update a file the caching systems goes its way, and there is no way of telling CloudFront easily to update files right now, at least on S3 Organizer Firefox extension.

So if someone updates a profile photo, if you use S3 you know changes will be instant. If you use CloudFront, will be faster, but user could or could not see the uploaded picture.

And as Amazon says, if you need update a file and distribute must contact Amazon.

I guess amazon in the following months will come up with a method to say “distribute now” so that changes are instant on a file. They are not doing this now so their network is not saturated I imagine.