Definition

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery service that works in conjunction with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide developers with a simple way to distribute content to end users. 

This service is useful for companies with a need for higher response times and large file content that want to distribute these files to a sizeable number of users. Once content is put in an origin server, like an Amazon Simple Storage Service bucket or an Elastic Compute Cloud instance, it’s pushed out to multiple CloudFront servers as content is requested.

CloudFront has features similar to dynamic site acceleration, a method used to improve online content delivery, but it can’t change the structure of content, like shrinking files or converting images into sprites.  CloudFront accelerates the delivery of dynamic content by moving it closer to the user to minimize internet hops involved in retrieving that content.

Amazon CloudFront is beneficial for someone developing a website that distributes a lot of content that needs to Scale-up. It can help reduce the costs and improve the performance of a website by providing high data transfer speeds, low latency and pay as you go pricing.

This was last updated in August 2014

Continue Reading About Amazon CloudFront

Dig Deeper on AWS cloud development

App Architecture
Cloud Computing
Software Quality
ITOperations
Close