Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service. You can speed up the delivery of static files using HTTP or HTTPS protocols. Each CloudFront distribution has a unique cloudfront.net domain name that can be used to reference objects through the global network of edge locations.

AWS CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations for content delivery. There are 20 locations in the USA, 16 locations in Europe, 13 in Asia, 2 in Australia, and 2 in South America. You can also monitor and receive notifications on the operational performance of CloudFront distributions using CloudWatch, and track trends in data transfer and requests checking the usage charts.

CloudFront is a powerful service and, during this lab, you will learn to create a fully functional CloudFront distribution using an S3 bucket as the origin. 

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

• Create an Amazon S3 bucket
• Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution
• Upload a demo website to an S3 bucket
• Serve S3 content through a CloudFront distribution
• Disable and delete a CloudFront distribution

Note: Cloudfront may take up to 25 minutes to deploy your distribution. You will need to wait until it is deployed to complete the laboratory.

Prerequisites

Experience with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront will be beneficial but is not required.

The following courses can be used to learn more about them:

• Introduction to Amazon S3
• Working with Amazon CloudFront

Updates

September 16th, 2022 - Updated CloudFront instructions to use origin access control (OAC)

March 15th, 2022 - Updated step 8 to better reflect the wait time for the CF delete pop up

February 23rd, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

February 11th, 2022 - Updated a link to a lab asset

December 7th, 2021 - Updated Amazon S3 instructions to use a bucket policy to grant public access

October 25th, 2021 - Updated lab steps to reflect new console UI and distribution creation workflow

September 7th, 2021 - Updated the lab step instructions for downloading the Demo gallery files from the Amazon S3 bucket 

January 4th, 2020 - Updated the make public lab step for the new Amazon S3 user-interface

August 25th, 2020 - Updated all screenshots and instructions

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab

November 20th, 2018 - Updated instructions to incorporate new S3 public access security settings