Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to your viewers with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront is integrated with AWS – including physical locations that are directly connected to the AWS global infrastructure, as well as software that works seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, and Lambda@Edge to run custom code close to your viewers.
You can get started with CloudFront in minutes, using the same AWS tools that you're already familiar with: APIs, AWS Management Console, AWS CloudFormation, CLIs, and SDKs. CloudFront offers a simple, pay-as-you-go pricing model with no upfront fees or required long-term contracts, and support for CloudFront is included in your existing AWS Support subscription.
AWS re:Invent video: 'Introduction to Amazon CloudFront and Lambda@Edge.'
Amazon CloudFront Benefits
Global, Growing Content Delivery Network
The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network is built on the expanding global AWS infrastructure that currently includes 54 Availability Zones within 18 geographic regions today. Amazon plans to add 12 more Availability Zones and 4 more Regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, and Sweden, as well as a second AWS GovCloud Region in the United States. Amazon CloudFront has 119 Points of Presence (108 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 58 cities across 26 countries. Our network of Edge location helps ensure that your applications deliver high availability, scalability, and performance for all of your customers from anywhere in the world
Secure Content at the Edge
Amazon CloudFront is a highly-secure Content Delivery Network (CDN) that provides both network and application level protection. All CloudFront customers benefit from the automatic protections of AWS Shield Standard, at no additional cost. CloudFront is also seamlessly integrated with AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced to help protect your applications from more sophisticated threats and DDoS attacks. CloudFront's infrastructure and processes are all compliant with PCI, DSS, HIPAA, and ISO to ensure secure delivery of your most sensitive data. You can deliver your secure APIs or applications using SSL/TLS, and advanced SSL features are enabled automatically. You can use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) to easily create as many custom SSL certificates as needed and immediately deploy them to your CloudFront distributions at no additional cost. ACM automatically handles certificate renewal, eliminating the overhead and costs of a manual renewal process.
Programmable CDN
With Lambda@Edge you can easily run your code across AWS locations worldwide, allowing you to respond to your end users with the lowest latency. Your code can be triggered by Amazon CloudFront events, such as content requests from or responses to origin servers and viewers. Upload your Node.js code to AWS Lambda and Lambda takes care of everything required to replicate, route and scale your code with high availability at an AWS location close to your end user. You pay only for the compute time that you use- there is no charge when your code is not running. All Amazon CloudFront features can be programmatically configured by using APIs or the AWS Management Console. Like other AWS services, CloudFront automatically scales to meet your needs and works with your existing AWS tools and resources, such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CLIs and SDKs, and AWS CloudWatch to monitor the performance of your Amazon CloudFront distributions.
High Performance
The Amazon CloudFront content delivery network is optimized for low latency and high data transfer speeds. CloudFront’s intelligent routing is based on real-world latency measurements continuously gathered from popular Internet sites, including Amazon.com. CloudFront is directly connected with hundreds of end-user ISPs and uses the AWS backbone network to accelerate the delivery of your content end-to-end. CloudFront also offers regional edge cache locations as part of the standard offering, to ensure consistently high cache hit ratios across the globe.
Cost Effective
Amazon CloudFront’s pricing is simple – you pay only for the data transfer and requests used to deliver content to your customers. With CloudFront, there are no upfront payments or fixed platform fees, no long-term commitments, no premiums for dynamic content, and no requirements for professional services to get started. If you use AWS origins such as Amazon S3 or Elastic Load Balancing, you pay only for storage costs, not for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront. And best of all, you can get started with CloudFront for free.
Deep Integration with Key AWS Services
Amazon CloudFront is deeply integrated with and optimized to work with popular AWS services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53 to help speed up DNS resolution of applications delivered by CloudFront. Integration with AWS Lambda allows you to execute custom logic across the AWS global network without provisioning or managing servers. With Amazon API Gateway you can further accelerate the delivery of your APIs.
Amazon CloudFront Case Studies
Amazon CloudFront Use Cases
Static Asset Caching
Amazon CloudFront can speed up the delivery of your static content (e.g., images, style sheets, JavaScript, etc.) to viewers across the globe. CloudFront offers a multi-tier cache by default, with regional edge caches that improve latency and lower the load on your origin servers when the object is not already cached at the edge. Caching static content gives you the performance and scale you need to give your viewers a fast and reliable experience when visiting your website.
Live and On-Demand Video Streaming
The Amazon CloudFront CDN offers multiple options for streaming your media – both pre-recorded files and live events – at sustained, high throughput required for 4K delivery to global viewers. For on-demand streaming, you can use CloudFront for multi-bitrate adaptive streaming in Microsoft Smooth, HLS, HDS, or MPEG-DASH formats to any device. To broadcast a live stream, you can use CloudFront to cache the media fragments at the edge and collapse multiple requests for the manifest file to reduce load to your origin.
Security and DDoS Protection
CloudFront integrates seamlessly with AWS Shield for Layer 3/4 DDoS mitigation and AWS WAF for Layer 7 protection. In addition, CloudFront negotiates TLS connections with the highest security ciphers, and authenticates viewers with signed URLs. You can also use our advanced feature Field-Level Encryption to protect most sensitive data throughout your enterprise, so the information can only be viewed by certain components and services in your application stack. CloudFront also integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access, with AWS CloudTrail to log access to your configuration, and with Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) for automated certificate renewals.
Dynamic and Customized Content
Amazon CloudFront has built-in network optimizations that help improve the performance, reliability, and global reach of the frequently updated dynamic portions of your application, as well as content personalized to each viewer. CloudFront works seamlessly with your existing web servers running in Amazon EC2 or in your own datacenter without the need to change your architecture or domain name. You can also offload custom logic as Lambda functions execute globally in line with CloudFront requests or responses. Learn more about Lambda@Edge.
API Acceleration
Amazon CloudFront can be used to secure and accelerate your API calls. CloudFront supports proxy methods (POST, PUT, OPTIONS, DELETE, and PATCH) and is already integrated with Amazon API Gateway by default. With CloudFront, TLS connections with clients terminate at a nearby edge location, then CloudFront uses optimized AWS-backbone network paths to securely reach your API servers. Learn more about using Cloudfront APIs.
Software Distribution
Amazon CloudFront scales automatically as globally-distributed clients download software updates. You can make your software available right at the edge where your users are via the content delivery network. CloudFront’s high data transfer rates speed up the delivery of your binaries, improving customer experience while lowering your costs.