Creating a CloudFront Distribution

 Introduction

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery service (CDN). In Amazon CloudFront, the content is organized into distributions.

Each distribution has a unique cloudfront.net domain name (e.g. cdn123.cloudfront.net) that can be used to reference objects through the global network of edge locations. 

To use Amazon CloudFront:

• Store the original versions of your files on one or more origin servers. An origin server is the location of the definitive version of an object. Origin servers could be an Amazon S3 bucket, an Amazon EC2 instance, an Elastic Load Balancer, or another remote server.
• Create a distribution to register the origin servers with Amazon CloudFront.
• Use your distribution’s domain name in your web pages, media player, or application. When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high-performance delivery of your content.

Instructions

1. In the AWS Management Console search bar, enter CloudFront, and click the CloudFront result under Services:

2. To start creating a CloudFront distribution, click Create a CloudFront distribution:

The distribution creation form will load that contains four main sections:

• Origin
• Default cache behavior
• Function associations
• Settings

3. Under Origin, in the Origin domain drop-down, select the S3 bucket you created in the previous lab step:

Warning: If you don't see the S3 bucket in the origins list, manually enter the following: <name_of_the_bucket>.s3.amazonaws.com

4. Under Origin, in the Origin access, select Origin access control settings and click Create control setting:

Under Create control setting, enter the following values:

• Name: Enter
• Signing behavior: Ensure Sign requests is selected

Origin access control secures S3 origins by allowing access to only designated distributions. This follows AWS best practice of using IAM service principals to authenticate with S3 origins.

5. Click Create

Leave all other fields in this section as well as the Default cache behavior section as their default values.

6. Scroll down to Settings, and in the Price class selection, select Use only North America and Europe:

Amazon CloudFront minimizes end-user latency by delivering content from its entire global network of edge locations. Price Classes let you reduce your delivery prices by excluding Amazon CloudFront’s more expensive edge locations from your Amazon CloudFront distribution. In these cases, Amazon CloudFront will deliver your content from edge locations within the locations in the price class you selected and charge you the data transfer and request pricing from the actual location where the content was delivered.

The time required for deploying a new CloudFront distribution also depends on the number of selected Edge Locations. Selecting all edge locations will take longer to deploy.

7. In the Default root object field, enter /gallery/index.html.

CloudFront will serve the default root object when the base distribution URL is requested.

8. To finish configuring your distribution, at the bottom of the page, click Create distribution:

You will be brought to the distribution details page.

CloudFront automatically assigns an ID (top of the page) and a Distribution domain name to the distribution and starts updating the edge locations to serve your content:

9. Return to the Distributions table by clicking the breadcrumb link at the top of the page:

Within the table, observe the Status field of your distribution. It will read Enabled while the Last modified field will display Deploying. 

You do not need to wait for the distribution to finish deploying completely, and you may proceed to the next lab step now.

Summary

In this lab step, you configured and created a CloudFront distribution.