An embarrassing S3 saga

Around July of 2009, a post was made to the AWS Developer Forums for S3(which the S3 team reads and responds to) asking for the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to be allowed on keys. The primary motivator for this is that sites would be able to store things like webfonts in S3.

The S3 team replied shortly after the initial post stating that this wasn’t in their immediate roadmap, but they’d watch the thread to help set priorities in the future. Fast-forward over two years, 101 replies, and 24,000 thread views later and we find ourselves still lacking this capability. If you look at the S3 AWS forum, you’re likely to see ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin header‘ still near the top.

It’s a shame that a reasonably simple request, which would greatly improve S3’s utility for webfont-bearing sites, has failed to even get a “We’re working on this” from the S3 team. We can’t expect them to drop what they’re doing and get on this, but they’ve remained completely non-committal on this.

The workarounds

The way we get around this issue is that we either:

• Serve webfonts from an nginx instance (not ideal, we’re using S3 so we don’t have to host media)
• Use a competitor’s service (Rackspace CloudFiles) just for fonts. Other CDNs and object stores support this header.