This is really interesting -- thanks for sharing. It seems to me that you could probably have nginx running on a regular box and then CloudFront as a caching CDN to avoid the S3 update delay.
Probably could figure that out, yeah. But we didn't want to take any chances given how important it was to get our live blog situation under control.
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Which is to say, we wanted a rock solid network and to essentially be a drop in a bucket of traffic, even at the insane burst that The Verge live blog gets.
