Ok, so you’ve created a lovely static site and/or set up a CloudFront distribution for https for it. But CloudFront bills by the GB. What if somebody decides your assets are perfect to hotlink to or just straight up makes an insane boatload of requests? How do you protect yourself from getting a frightening bill before AWS Budget can even notify you?

Setting up Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Set up a topic

• First, you’re going to want to be notified. Go to Services -> Simple Notification Service to set up a pathway for that to happen.
• Next, click “Topics” and then [Create topic]
• Name your topic something that adequately describes the purpose (I just used domainname-com)
• Scroll down to [Create Topic]

Set up a subcription

• Under “Amazon SNS” left sidebar, click “Subscriptions” and [Create Subscription]
• Click on the Topic ARN field and you should be able to see an ARN with your topic name as the last part of the ARN. Click that ARN
• Under Protocol, select your preferred method of notification (I’m going with SMS.
• Under Endpoint, enter your cell number, including country code (+18005551212 for (800) 555-1212 in the US)

Get Notified

• Go to Services -> CloudFront -> Alarms
• [Create Alarm]
• Under Metric, choose the threshold that you want to detect on… maybe it’s Requests, maybe it’s Bytes Downloaded…

• Select the distribution that you want to watch ( domainname.com should be mentioned in the dropdown)
• For “Send a notification to”, select the SNS topic that corresponds to the notification method you set up.
• Since mine is a dev/test site, I don’t expect more than a request/second so

• Finally, [Create Alarm]

Testing the Alarm

• If you have a low enough threshold you can probably just hold down F5 (or whatever your refresh key is) for a few seconds. (Word of caution: Don’t do this with a page that downloads a lot of assets!)
• In bash you can also do the following.

for i in {1..61}
do
  curl https://domainname.com
done

• If your notifications are working, you should get an message through your preferred notification method.
• Under Services -> CloudWatch -> Alarms, you should also see your Alarm count be > 0.