CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN). The idea is that if a user in say, Singapore hits our web site, the files she requested will be cached in a location near her and her next access (or that of any other user in that area) will be faster.
Our CloudFront distribution can be managed through the AWS Console.
Once CloudFront is running, there isn't much you have to do.
Just be aware that when you hit bioconductor.org, you are hitting CloudFront.
A good way to test this is as follows:
$ curl -I http://bioconductor.org/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 16531
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Tue, 19 May 2015 17:38:25 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.12 (Linux/SUSE)
Last-Modified: Tue, 19 May 2015 17:30:47 GMT
ETag: "62f141-4093-51672abbe1fc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=600
Expires: Tue, 19 May 2015 17:48:25 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: Miss from cloudfront
Via: 1.1 70d79aa19e315b47281005f9e3c25c88.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Amz-Cf-Id: 97PFtz_9dGUDk2kHEjggRwbhRkcSG0vNg9akW2y70mvyK0iKO882MA==
The X-cache and X-Amz... headers tell you you are dealing with CloudFront.
If you want to hit the web server directly, go instead to
http://master.bioconductor.org.
Different file types have different cache expiration times, this is set in the different .htaccess files for the web site.
If a file gets propagated by CloudFront that shouldn't be, you can remove it by invalidating it, go to the console page for our distribution and click on the "Invalidations" tab.