nginx and self-healing S3 static hosting

[Ian M. Evans]

Thomas wrote:
> Remeber that if your server is down, and Nginx is on that server, then
> Nginx won't be able to perform the "if" statement and to decide to
> serve files locally or from a remote server.

I'm sorry, you missed the point of my post. I was talking about sites 
that host their static content on Amazon's S3 storage cloud not their 
EC2 server cloud. S3 recently had a five hour outage and it affected 
sites who store their images on S3 like Twitter and thousands of others.

So my question still applies since nginx is running on _our_ servers and 
we just need to check if _Amazon_'s servers are running.

If Amazon's S3 is down, nginx serves static locally, otherwise, nginx 
rewrites all static requests to media.example.com which is an alias for 
your S3 bucket.