CloudFront

Overview

• Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.

• Global in scope

Edge Locations (Points of Presence)

An AWS Edge location is a site that CloudFront uses to cache copies of the content for faster delivery to users at any location.

Think read performance

There are 216 points of presence globally

CloudFront Origins

• S3 bucket
  • For distributing files and caching them at the edge
  • Security
    • modding s3 bucket policy
    • Enhanced security with CloudFront Origin Access Control (OAC)
      • OAC is replacing Origin Access Identity (OAI)
  • CloudFront can be used as an ingress (to upload files to S3)
• Custom Origins (HTTP)
  • Application load balancer
  • EC2 instance
  • S3 static website
    • bucket needs static s3 hosting enabled as it is not by default

CloudFront vs S3 Cross Region Replication

• CloudFront
  • Global
  • Cached for TTL (~24 hours)
  • For static content that must be available everywhere
• S3 CRR
  • Requires setup for each targetted region of replication
  • Files updated live (near real-time)
  • Read only

Pricing

• Cost of data out per edge location VARIES
• The more out, the lower the cost becomes
• 

Prices Classes

• There are three price classes
  1. Price Class All: all regions - best performance
  2. Price Class 200: most regions, but excluding most expensive regions
  3. Price Class 100: ONLY the least expensive regions
• Refer to the graphics below for visualizing these classes
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Exam perspectives

• If you see “Content Delivery Network,” you should be thinking CloudFront