CloudFront
CloudFront is a fully managed and fast content delivery network (CDN), that speeds up the distribution or streaming of static, dynamic, or streaming content to end users.
CloudFront delivers the content via a global network of data centers known as edge locations or Point of Presence (POP).
CloudFront securely delivers data and videos to customers worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds. All this while maintaining a developer-friendly environment.
CloudFront provides businesses and web app developers with an easy and cost-effective method to distribute content at low latency and high data transfer rates.
CloudFront speeds up content distribution by routing every request to the edge location that can most serve the content, thus reducing latency (time delay)
CloudFront uses AWS backbone network to dramatically reduce the number of network hops users’ requests must pass through. This helps improve performance, provide lower latency, and increase data transfer rate.
CloudFront is a great choice for distribution of frequently accessed static material that benefits from edge delivery – such as popular website images, videos or media filesCloudFront Benefits
CloudFront makes it easy to manage a network of cache servers at multiple sites across the internet. It also eliminates the need for over-provisioning capacity to meet potential spikes in traffic.
CloudFront provides greater reliability and availability as copies of objects are kept at multiple edge locations around the globe.
CloudFront maintains persistent connections to the origin servers so that files can be downloaded from the origin servers as soon as possible.
CloudFront also uses techniques like collapsing concurrent viewer requests at an Edge location for the same file into one request to the Origin server, reducing the load on it.
CloudFront provides the most advanced security features, including field-level encryption as well as HTTPS support.
CloudFront seamlessly integrates to AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall-WAF, and Route 53 to protect against multiple types attacks, including network layer DDoS attacks.
CloudFront also offers Regional Edge Caches, which help bring more content closer and improve performance.
Regional Edge Caches are placed between the Edge Locations and the origin servers worldwide.
Regional edge caches can support multiple Edge Locations. They also support a larger cache size, so objects stay longer at the closest regional edge cache location.
Regional edge caches help with all types of content, particularly content that tends to become less popular over time.Configuration & Content DeliveryConfiguration
To distribute files, origin servers must be configured. An origin server is a storage device that stores the original, definitive versions of the objects. It can be an AWS service for e.g. S3, EC2, and an on-premise server
Files and objects can be added/uploaded onto Origin servers with public read permissions, or restricted to Origin Access Identity (OAI).
CloudFront can be used to create a distribution that tells CloudFront from which origin servers the files should be obtained when users request them.
CloudFront sends the distribution configurations to all the edge locations.
The website can be used with a CloudFront domain name or a custom domain name.
An origin server can be configured for access restrictions, caching behaviour, headers to files to add TTL or expiration time.
Delivery of content to users
When a user visits the website, file or object – the DNS routing
