A Quick Overview of Amazon CloudFront – Part 1

Introduction

CloudFront is a content delivery network or CDN. It delivers the object/content to the user and stores the latest version in the cache at that edge location.

An edge location is the nearest approximate point to the end user using the AWS service that contains a small setup instead of the server and is responsible to deliver static content as a quick response to the user request.

There are over 400+ Edge Locations and 13 Regional Edge Caches. It also provides DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection to protect against an attack that is distributed denial of service, it gives you integration with a shield and web application firewall.

It follows you pay as you go and pay only for what you use.

Use Cases

• Static content delivery

CloudFront can speed up the delivery of your static to viewers across the globe

• Live video streaming

It offers several options for streaming your media to global viewers— both live events and pre-recorded videos.

Let us understand the CloudFront with an example,

Suppose we have an S3 bucket in India and an end-user from UAE wants to access it, it is going to access an edge location close to it.

CloudFront disperses content (objects), you include files to one of the origins simply indicated for the distribution, and you expose a CloudFront link to the files. CloudFront edge area doesn’t get the new records from the origin until the edge location receives viewer requests for them

So, In UAE and that network is going to be transmitted over the private AWS network, all the way to the S3 bucket, and the content is going to be cached. The idea is that this UAE user, with the more users you have in UAE, the more they will want to do the same kind of reads, they will all have content served directly from UAE, not necessarily from India, because it will be fetched once into UAE and then served from there so cached locally.

• CloudFront Security

CloudFront Geo Restriction: This a feature that allows organizations to use Amazon CloudFront to restrict access to your content based on the geographic location of your viewers

Whitelist: Allow your users to access the content if and only if they are in the list of approved countries

Backlist: Prevent your users from accessing the content if and only if they are on the list of disapproved countries

The country is determined using a third-party Geo-IP-Database

• Viewer Protocol Policy

Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS: End users can use both protocols. HTTP GET and HEAD requests are automatically redirected to HTTPS requests

HTTPS only: End users can access your content only if they are using HTTPS. If a user sends an HTTP request instead of an HTTPS request, in response to that CloudFront returns an HTTP status code 403 and does not return the object.

Using HTTPS for your CDN distribution can guarantee that the encrypted traffic between the edge servers and the application viewers cannot be decrypted by the attackers in case they can intercept packets sent across the CDN distribution network.

Advantages

• Amazon CloudFront CDN is time-saving. It includes a web service interface that diminishes workload and guarantees high efficiency.
• It is utilized to make the learning encounter way better and smoother. It delivers content from edge locations to clients to diminish the workload on end-users
• Companies can cache the content on CloudFront edge locations all-inclusive, which in turn diminishes the workload and increases the accessibility of your application.

Conclusion

Amazon CloudFront plays a crucial part in building organizational development and making strides in performance speed like data transfer between diverse AWS administrations and networks. It makes a difference in companies in terms of the reliability and accessibility of spam-free content to its end clients.

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