Amazon CloudFront | General Flashcards
What is Amazon CloudFront?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that gives businesses and web application developers an easy and cost effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees. With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations.
What can I do with Amazon CloudFront?
General
Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront provides a simple API that lets you:
Distribute content with low latency and high data transfer rates by serving requests using a network of edge locations around the world.
Get started without negotiating contracts and minimum commitments.
How do I get started with Amazon CloudFront?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Click the “Create Free Account” button on the Amazon CloudFront detail page. If you choose to use another AWS service as the origin for the files served through Amazon CloudFront, you must sign up for that service before creating CloudFront distributions.
How do I use Amazon CloudFront?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
To use Amazon CloudFront, you:
For static files, store the definitive versions of your files in one or more origin servers. These could be Amazon S3 buckets. For your dynamically generated content that is personalized or customized, you can use Amazon EC2 – or any other web server – as the origin server. These origin servers will store or generate your content that will be distributed through Amazon CloudFront.
Register your origin servers with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call. This call will return a CloudFront.net domain name that you can use to distribute content from your origin servers via the Amazon CloudFront service. For instance, you can register the Amazon S3 bucket “bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com” as the origin for all your static content and an Amazon EC2 instance “dynamic.myoriginserver.com” for all your dynamic content. Then, using the API or the AWS Management Console, you can create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that might return “abc123.cloudfront.net” as the distribution domain name.
Include the cloudfront.net domain name, or a CNAME alias that you create, in your web application, media player, or website. Each request made using the cloudfront.net domain name (or the CNAME you set-up) is routed to the edge location best suited to deliver the content with the highest performance. The edge location will attempt to serve the request with a local copy of the file. If a local copy is not available, Amazon CloudFront will get a copy from the origin. This copy is then available at that edge location for future requests.
How does Amazon CloudFront provide higher performance?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront employs a global network of edge locations and regional edge caches that cache copies of your content close to your viewers. Amazon CloudFront ensures that end-user requests are served by the closest edge location. As a result, viewer requests travel a short distance, improving performance for your viewers. For files not cached at the edge locations and the regional edge caches, Amazon CloudFront keeps persistent connections with your origin servers so that those files can be fetched from the origin servers as quickly as possible. Finally, Amazon CloudFront uses additional optimizations – e.g. wider TCP initial congestion window – to provide higher performance while delivering your content to viewers.
How does Amazon CloudFront lower my costs to distribute content over the Internet?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront has no minimum commitments and charges you only for what you use. Compared to self-hosting, Amazon CloudFront spares you from the expense and complexity of operating a network of cache servers in multiple sites across the internet and eliminates the need to over-provision capacity in order to serve potential spikes in traffic. Amazon CloudFront also uses techniques such as collapsing simultaneous viewer requests at an edge location for the same file into a single request to your origin server. This reduces the load on your origin servers reducing the need to scale your origin infrastructure, which can bring you further cost savings.
Additionally, if you are using an AWS origin (e.g., Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, etc.), effective December 1, 2014, we are no longer charging for AWS data transfer out to Amazon CloudFront. This applies to data transfer from all AWS regions to all global CloudFront edge locations.
How does Amazon CloudFront speed up my entire website?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront uses standard cache control headers you set on your files to identify static and dynamic content. Delivering all your content using a single Amazon CloudFront distribution helps you make sure that performance optimizations are applied to your entire website or web application. When using AWS origins, you benefit from improved performance, reliability, and ease of use as a result of AWS’s ability to track and adjust origin routes, monitor system health, respond quickly when any issues occur, and the integration of Amazon CloudFront with other AWS services. You also benefit from using different origins for different types of content on a single site – e.g. Amazon S3 for static objects, Amazon EC2 for dynamic content, and custom origins for third-party content – paying only for what you use.
How is Amazon CloudFront different from Amazon S3?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront is a good choice for distribution of frequently accessed static content that benefits from edge delivery—like popular website images, videos, media files or software downloads.
How is Amazon CloudFront different from traditional content delivery solutions?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront lets you quickly obtain the benefits of high performance content delivery without negotiated contracts or high prices. Amazon CloudFront gives all developers access to inexpensive, pay-as-you-go pricing – with a self-service model. Developers also benefit from tight integration with other Amazon Web Services. The solution is simple to use with Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and Elastic Load Balancing as origin servers, giving developers a powerful combination of durable storage and high performance delivery. Amazon CloudFront also integrates with Amazon Route 53 and AWS CloudFormation for further performance benefits and ease of configuration.
What types of content does Amazon CloudFront support?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront supports all files that can be served over HTTP. This includes dynamic web pages, such as HTML or PHP pages, any popular static files that are a part of your web application, such as website images, audio, video, media files or software downloads. For on-demand media files, you can also choose to stream your content using RTMP delivery. Amazon CloudFront also supports delivery of live media over HTTP.
Does Amazon CloudFront support delivery of dynamic content?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Amazon CloudFront supports all files that can be served over HTTP. This includes dynamic web pages, such as HTML or PHP pages, any popular static files that are a part of your web application, such as website images, audio streams, video streams, media files or software downloads. For on-demand media files, you can also choose to stream your content using RTMP delivery. Amazon CloudFront also supports delivery of live media over HTTP.
Does Amazon CloudFront work with non-AWS origin servers?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Yes. Amazon CloudFront works with any origin server that holds the original, definitive versions of your content, both static and dynamic. There is no additional charge to use a custom origin.
Does Amazon CloudFront offer a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Yes. The Amazon CloudFront SLA provides for a service credit if a customer’s monthly uptime percentage is below our service commitment in any billing cycle. More information can be found here.
Can I use the AWS Management Console with Amazon CloudFront?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
Yes. You can use the AWS Management Console to configure and manage Amazon CloudFront though a simple, point-and-click web interface. The AWS Management Console supports most of Amazon CloudFront’s features, letting you get Amazon CloudFront’s low latency delivery without writing any code or installing any software. Access to the AWS Management Console is provided free of charge at https://console.aws.amazon.com.
What tools and libraries work with Amazon CloudFront?
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Amazon CloudFront | Networking & Content Delivery
There are a variety of tools for managing your Amazon CloudFront distribution and libraries for various programming languages available in our resource center.
