Blog 9-SP21

Amazon Web Services | AWS CloudFront

What is a CloudFront?

Why hello there reader, Welcome to this weeks blog about AWS CloudFront! Have you ever felt the need to accelerate a static website’s content delivery, or provide video on demand or live streaming to your users, or even encrypt specific fields throughout your system? No? Well niether have I! But it’s good to know that AWS Cloud front will help you with configuring those services! All jokes aside, using AWS CloudFront will make your life easier.

AWS CLoudFront is a speedy CDN service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, APIs to users globally. Content Delivery Network, CDN for short, is a highley distributed platform of servers that help to minimize delays in loading webpage content by reducing the the actually distance between the user and the physical server. But in simpler terms, it helps user view things on the internet, all around the world, with high quuality and minimal buffering. Cloudfront is able to do that while also being low latency and having high transfer speeds.In addition, it also is able to provide developers a “developer-friendly” working environment. But what makes CloudFront different amongst other CDNs, is its ability to quickly obtain the benefits of high performance content delivery without negotiated contracts, high prices, or minimum fees. And since it’s an AWS service, it has built in pay as you go pricing. Hooray for Cloud Services.

How CloudFront Works

CloudFront is able to do it’s job through a world wide network of Amazon edge locations. When a user of your website wants to view content, the user is routed to the edge location that provide the lowest amount of latency, giving that user fast and good quality service. Edge locations are designed to provide content as quickly as possible to your users.

When certain objects become less and less popular, it’s removed for that edge location. Clearing the space for other popular content. The less popular content from earlieris placed in what’s known as Regional caches. These are located between the edge location and the origin server. Since it has a larger cache than an edge location, the less popular content can remain there. And if a user has needs to access that, it will be faster that retrieving that data from the orgin server. This just generally helps the performance for your viewers.

Use Case

Like stated previously AWS CloudFront can speed up the delivery of your static content. Things like images, style sheets, etc can all be accessed quicker, as stated previously your harnessing AWS network and CloudFront edge servers to provide your users fast, safe, and reliable content.

Conclusion

It’s a nifty tool, if your running a poplar media centered website, where live streaming, or videos are needed, and speed of service directly impacts your users/audiences satisfaction of your site. Like many AWS services it will also work in conjuction with other infrastructure critical services, making it a valuable and adaptable tool in your AWS arsenal.