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.

I have been writing blogs by putting the limelight on major and legacy AWS services. I noticed I should make budding AWS Engineers should understand one of the simple yet most effective services of AWS that is widely used in current days for speeding up their data transmission and hence this blog on the service AWS CloudFront. Let's get started!!!!

In a simple term, we can say AWS CloudFront is a data/content caching technology that resides at the defined edge locations. So, what is edge location? An edge location is the nearest point to the consumer(user) who is consuming the AWS service. In these locations, the server is not present but AWS CloudFront is set up in which data is cached and will be sent to the user from that nearest edge location instead of picking it from the original location thus speeding up the transfer rate.

AWS CloudFront distribution supports two delivery methods one is Web distribution and the other is RTMP distribution.

When to use Web distribution? Choose Web distribution if you are looking to speed up the distribution of static and dynamic content such as html, css, php, and graphic files. Distribute media files using HTTP or HTTPS. Here, you store your files in an origin- either in an S3 bucket or a Web server.

When to choose RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol)? Choose RTMP if you want to speed up the distribution of your streaming media files. An RTMP distribution allows an end-user to begin playing media files before the file has finished downloading from a CloudFront edge location.

Look at the below hands-on video to set up AWS CloudFront distribution with an S3 bucket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEdYnN8dnRs

Start serving your dynamic content through AWS CloudFront distribution by setting up Elastic Load Balancer for your EC2 instances which contains the dynamic data. When you set up a CloudFront distribution your data will be sent to an edge location using CloudFront’s private network and cached at the location avoiding data transmission via the internet.

Serve both static and dynamic content using AWS CloudFormation.

youtube.com/watch?v=tqoDBNWBwas

Benefits of AWS CloudFront:

1. Global Scaled Network for Fast Content Delivery: The CloudFront network has 225+ points of presence (PoPs) that are interconnected via the AWS backbone delivering ultra-low latency performance and high availability to your end-users.
2. Security at the edge: All your CloudFront distributions are defended by default against the most frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks that target your websites or applications with AWS Shield Standard. To defend against more complex attacks, you can add a flexible, layered security perimeter by integrating CloudFront with AWS Shield Advanced and AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
3. Cost-Effective: Amazon CloudFront offers cost-effective content delivery globally. Integrated with AWS, there are no transfer fees for origin fetches from any AWS origin and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) offers custom TLS certificates, at no charge.

Read the real-world use cases where AWS CloudFront usage has tremendously improved performance of the data transmission and live streaming in different technology platforms.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/?nc=sn&loc=0

AWS CloudFront official documentation….. https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/?nc=sn&loc=0

Content and information credits: KnowledgeIndia youtube channel and AWS official blog page.

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LEARN and BE CURIOUS!!!!!

Happy Learning,

Yogendra