aws-cloudfront needs love

We should redesign the API for the aws-cloudfront construct library. There’s a lot we can do in order to make it friendlier, less error-prone and less flat and declarative. At the moment, it’s basically “leaking” the low level API provided by CloudFormation.

Furthermore, it would be awesome if one could use Assets to point to a local directory that includes the web distribution content and have the toolkit do the work of uploading it to S3 and all that.

[PaulMaddox]

For reference, this is what the current API looks like just to setup a simple SPA/PWA:

const bucket = new s3.Bucket(this, 'WebsiteBucket', {
    bucketName: 'pmaddox-website-bucket',
    versioned: true,
});

const originId = new cloudfront.cloudformation.CloudFrontOriginAccessIdentityResource(this, 'OriginAccessIdentity', {
    cloudFrontOriginAccessIdentityConfig: {
        comment: 'A comment to associate with this CloudFront origin access identity',
    }
});

const cert = acm.Certificate.import(this, 'ExistingCertificate', {
    certificateArn: new acm.CertificateArn('arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:123456789012:certificate/7d3591e4-de7f-45cf-f8f5-7cc3d1732930'),
});

const distribution = new cloudfront.CloudFrontWebDistribution(this, 'WebsiteDistribution', {
    aliasConfiguration: {
        names: ['my-website.com', 'www.my-website.com'],
        acmCertRef: cert.certificateArn,
    },
    originConfigs: [{
        behaviors: [{
            isDefaultBehavior: true,
        }],
        s3OriginSource: {
            originAccessIdentity: originId,
            s3BucketSource: bucket,
        },
    }]
})

The new API should improve the linking of S3 buckets to CloudFront distributions, and abstract away the need to explicitly create a CloudFrontOriginAccessIdentityResource.

It would be really nice if we could tie this in with #605 to handle certificate generation/validation too.

Furthermore, it would be awesome if one could use Assets to point to a local directory that includes the web distribution content and have the toolkit do the work of uploading it to S3 and all that.

👍

[njlynch]

The “love” this module needs was designed in this RFC (https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-rfcs/issues/171) and implementation of the initial “Developer Preview” version is being tracked via this milestone: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/milestone/5.

There is also the overall tracking issue #6490 where high-level feature work can be tracked.

Closing this issue out in favor of the above.