Secure Cloud Files and CDN URLs

This article covers information about Cloud Files and its access to a content delivery network (CDN).

HTTP or HTTPS access to Cloud Files containers

You can access every Cloud Files container through HTTP or HTTPS.

In the Cloud Control Panel, select Storage > Files, click the gear icon for the container,
and select View All Links, which displays the following CDN links:

Note: Streaming and iOS Streaming URLs will be decommissioned on July 31, 2022.

If you find that the HTTP URL is too long, you can shorten it with a CNAME pointing to that URL.

Because the CNAME technique does not work for HTTPS, you can set up Cloud Files with access to a CDN
with a secure delivery option. Optionally, you might want to self-host the content.

The HTTPS link is a shared certificate that you can use to encrypt the connection between the client
requesting the object and the Akamai® edge-node to which the client is connecting.

The HTTPS link is useful if the data transmitted has sensitive information in it.
The cross-origin resource sharing standard (CORS) is also supported, but it solves
an entirely different problem. Specifically, CORS solves the access problem of asynchronous requests
by a browser that browses a website with a domain that is different from the Cloud Files link.
For more information on this topic, see the Enable CORS site or
the Cloud Files API documentation.

Access CDN-enabled objects

Cloud Files does not support access control on CDN-enabled objects.

To access those objects, you should self-host the files on a server and configure
Rackspace CDN,
which allows you to restrict access based on Internet Protocol (IP) address ranges.

You should not daisy chain CDN services, but you can set up a Rackspace CDN configuration that has
an origin as a Cloud Files container. This allows you to keep your files in a container and utilize
Rackspace CDN's restriction feature.

Updated about 1 year ago