amazon web services - Force CloudFront distribution/file update

Question

I'm using Amazon's CloudFront to serve static files of my web apps.

Is there no way to tell a cloudfront distribution that it needs to refresh it's file or point out a single file that should be refreshed?

Amazon recommend that you version your files like logo_1.gif, logo_2.gif and so on as a workaround for this problem but that seems like a pretty stupid solution. Is there absolutely no other way?

Answer 1

Good news. Amazon finally added an Invalidation Feature. See the API Reference.

This is a sample request from the API Reference:

POST /2010-08-01/distribution/[distribution ID]/invalidation HTTP/1.0
Host: cloudfront.amazonaws.com
Authorization: [AWS authentication string]
Content-Type: text/xml

<InvalidationBatch>
   <Path>/image1.jpg</Path>
   <Path>/image2.jpg</Path>
   <Path>/videos/movie.flv</Path>
   <CallerReference>my-batch</CallerReference>
</InvalidationBatch>