Amazon CloudFront

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

• A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
• A CDN allows for the quick transfer/loading of Internet content including HTML pages, javascript files, images, and videos.
• The CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon
• Benefits of using a CDN
  • Improving website load times
  • Reducing bandwidth costs
  • Increasing content availability and redundancy
  • Improving website security

Popular CDN Services

• Cloudflare CDN
• Akamai CDN
• Amazon CloudFront
• Microsoft Azure CDN
• Google Cloud CDN
• Alibaba Cloud CDN
• Imperva Cloud Application Security
• Rackspace CDN
• Fastly CDN
• CDN77 CDN

What is AWS CloudFront

• 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.
• Use cases
  • Deliver fast, secure websites
  • Accelerate dynamic content delivery and APIs
  • Stream live and on-demand video
  • Distribute patches and updates

AWS CloudFront

• CloudFront is a global (not regional) service.
• Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image and video files.
• CloudFront delivers your content through a network of data centers called Edge Locations.
• When a user requests content that you’re serving with CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency.
• Amazon CloudFront has added several regional edge cache locations globally.
• DDoS protection, integration with Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall

CloudFront Origins

• An origin is the location where you store the original web content, which you want to distribute via CloudFront
• S3 bucket
  • For distributing files and caching them at the edge
  • Enhanced security with CloudFront Origin Access Identity (OAI)
• Custom Origin (HTTP)
  • Application Load Balancer
  • EC2 instance
  • S3 website (must first enable the bucket as a static S3 website)
  • Any HTTP backend you want

Amazon CloudFront Distributions

• Web Distributions: serve the following content over HTTP or HTTPS:
  • Static and dynamic download content, for example, .html, .css, .js, and image files, using HTTP or HTTPS.
  • Multimedia content on demand using progressive download and Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS).
  • Your origin can be either an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server
• RTMP distributions
  • Stream media files using Adobe Media Server and the Adobe Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).
  • An RTMP distribution must use an Amazon S3 bucket as the origin.
• CloudFront lets you create a total of up to 200 web distributions and 100 RTMP distributions for an AWS account.

CloudFront Invalidation

• If you need to remove/update an object from CloudFront edge caches before it expires, you can do one of the following:
  • Invalidate the object from edge caches. The next time a viewer requests the object, CloudFront returns to the origin to fetch the latest version of the object.
  • Use object versioning to serve a different version of the object that has a different name.
  • You can’t cancel an invalidation after you submit it.
• You can invalidate most types of objects that are served by a web distribution
• You cannot invalidate media files in the Microsoft Smooth Streaming format when you have enabled Smooth Streaming for the corresponding cache behavior.

Geographic Restrictions

• You can use geo restriction, also known as geo-blocking, to prevent users in specific geographic locations from accessing content that you’re distributing through a CloudFront web distribution.
• Restriction type
  • No restrictions
  • Allow list
  • Block list