Amazon CloudFront
- What it is
- Content delivery network (CDN). Caches content at 600+ Edge Locations worldwide, close to users.
- Reduces latency for viewers and offloads traffic from the origin.
- Origins
- Amazon S3, EC2, an Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon API Gateway, or any HTTP server including on premises.
- Beyond caching
- Integrates with AWS WAF and AWS Shield for edge security and DDoS protection.
- Free TLS certificates via AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).
- Origin Access Control (OAC) locks an S3 bucket so it is reachable only through CloudFront.
- CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge run code at the edge.
- Data transfer out through CloudFront is cheaper than direct from the origin.
- Not to be confused with
- AWS Global Accelerator — uses the same edge network but for TCP/UDP routing and static anycast IPs; it does not cache. CloudFront is for cacheable HTTP content.