We’re going to learn about Amazon CloudFront and how to make it work for you. First, since CloudFront is a kind of content delivery network (CDN), it’s probably worthwhile spending a bit of time discussing exactly how CDNs work, and what they do.
The idea of a content delivery network (sometimes called a content distribution network) is nothing new. It’s really nothing more than a set of servers distributed across the Internet to serve highly available, high performance content to end-users.
The primary goal of a CDN is delivering content from providers (like media companies) to their audiences as quickly and reliably as possible. The model works by delivering content from the CDN server closest to the users who will consume it, thereby eliminating as many network hops as possible.
Among other advantages, a CDN can:
If there are advantages, there will be some negatives too:
The CDN market has many active providers, including CloudFare, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks.
So we’ve described CDNs and some of the major players. But there’s someone really obvious we’ve left out.
As the cloud continues to dominate application and content delivery, Amazon Web Services continues to dominate the cloud. There can’t be many providers who haven’t at least considered moving their operations to the AWS cloud. At the same time, AWS works hard to understand its customers’ requirements and wants to be able to provide an environment that addresses all their needs. Since distributed content delivery is a common need, it only makes sense that AWS would offer CloudFront: a fully integrated solution.
To achieve the low latency connections providers need, CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations:
Getting started with Amazon CloudFront is quick and simple. Let’s see what has to be done to configure CloudFront.
Note: You can fine-tune your distribution by setting values like the expiration time for files to remain in cache before they are refreshed, and which groups of CloudFront edge locations you’d like to use (i.e., US only, US and Europe, or all locations).
Once the setup is ready, your Amazon CloudFront distribution is ready to serve requests. Your DNS service will route a request from your end user to the CloudFront endpoint URL, and CloudFront will send it to the edge location that can best serve the user’s request. CloudFront first checks its cache for the requested files, if it’s there it’s all good. But if it’s not found in the cache, it checks your distribution configuration and forwards the request to the origin server.
This diagram can help to visualize the process:
Besides the more obvious features we’ve already seen, with Amazon CloudFront, you can also:
I hope this blog was able to satisfy at least your initial curiosity about Amazon CloudFront. This is an exciting and useful area and I strongly encourage you to investigate the free 7-day trial subscription from Cloud Academy. They offer multiple learning products on this very topic:
I’ve tried to inspire your desire for greater learning. I haven’t attempted a deep dive because that must requires greater time and space than this blog offers. What I’d like you to take away from reading this post is a familiarization with the way that AWS handles the problem of fast and efficient content delivery. Maybe you are motivated to dig deeper with Cloud Academy’s labs, video courses or quizzes. Cloud Academy labs let learners work in a real AWS environment without setting up an AWS account. So take the trial and see what you think.
Feedback is critical to us, so let me know what you think and where we can do better.
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