Amazon Cloudfront - A content delivery network Amazon Cloudfront - A content delivery network

Amazon Web Services provides a content delivery network (CDN) which is referred to as Amazon Cloudfront. This type of content delivery network is made up of a global network of proxy servers. They cache content closer to consumers, such as web videos and other bulky media, to deliver more effective content delivery. This improves the speed at which content can be accessed.

There are servers for CloudFront in Europe Asia, Australia, South America, Africa, and several major cities in the United States. Currently, there are 400 edge locations spread across six continents, providing the service on six continents as of November 2022.

What is CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that provide fast content delivery on the internet.

content delivery network map content delivery network map

Features

Reduce Latency Reduce Latency

Reduce Latency

Deliver data through 410+ globally distributed Points of Presence (PoPs) to reduce latency. Get automated network mapping and intelligent routing.

Improved Security Improved Security

Improved Security

Advanced security with traffic encryption and access controls. Use the AWS Shield Standard to defend against DDoS attacks.

Cut Costs Cut Costs

Cut Costs

Reduce costs with integrated requests and custom pricing options. There are zero fees for data transfer from AWS origins.

How does CDN work?

CloudFront delivers the content through a worldwide network of AWS data centers called edge locations. When a user requests the content, Cloudfront routes it to the edge location that offers the lowest latency. It is how the content is delivered with the best possible performance.

Amazon Cloudfront Diagram Amazon Cloudfront Diagram

Amazon Cloudfront offers built-in data compression, edge computing, and field-level encryption. You can reach customers across the globe in milliseconds.

Optimize dynamic content delivery for your Magento websites. You can use the feature-rich AWS global network infrastructure that supports edge termination and WebSockets.

Amazon CloudFront offers programmable and secure edge CDN computing with CloudFront Functions. You can scale instantly to millions of requests per second with minimal latency overhead.

FAQs

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that helps to distribute content with low latency.

Like other AWS services, CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering. It has no long-term commitments or minimum fees.

With CloudFront, your Magento 2 website content is delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations.

It offers a simple API that enables you to:

  • Distribute content with high speed by serving requests using a network of edge locations worldwide.
  • Get a scalable CDN service without extensive contracts and minimum commitments.

The Amazon CloudFront works with a global network of edge locations. These are distributed networks of AWS data centers that cache copies of your website content close to the users.

The closest edge location serves the end-user requests. The short distance between the user and the edge location improves the site’s performance.

Amazon CloudFront integrates persistent connections with your origin servers for the files not cached at the edge locations. Such files are fetched from the origin servers as quickly as possible.

Amazon CloudFront also optimizes speed with a wider TCP initial congestion window. It provides high performance while delivering your content to users.

Amazon CloudFront is one of the services by Amazon Web Services with no minimum commitments and charges. It reduces the expense and complexity of operating a network of cache servers on multiple sites across the internet.

You also don’t have to add extra capacity to serve potential spikes in traffic.

It also collapses simultaneous viewer requests for the same file into a single request. The process reduces the load on your origin servers and decreases the scaling requirements. Such content serving techniques lead to more cost savings.

Amazon CloudFront CDN supports content sent using the HTTPS or WebSocket protocols.

It includes dynamic web pages such as HTML or PHP pages. You can also distribute WebSocket applications and popular static files on your web application.

The files include website images, audio, video, media files, or downloads. It also supports the delivery of live or on-demand media streaming over HTTPS.

Yes, you can use the Geo Restriction feature to specify a list of countries. These are the countries where your users can access your Magento website content.

The CDN also lets you specify the countries where your users cannot access your content. A viewer in a restricted country gets an HTTP status code 403 (Forbidden) on their request.

You can create custom error messages with your content for HTTP 4xx and 5xx error responses. You can configure Amazon CloudFront to return your custom error messages to the viewer.

Amazon CloudFront is a PCI DSS-compliant service with Merchant Level 1. The level is the highest level of compliance for service providers.