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CloudFront

Origins​

  • S3 Buckets
    • For distributing files and caching them at the edge
    • Enhanced security with CloudFront Origin Access Control (OAC)
  • Custom Origin (HTTP)
    • Application Load Balancer
    • EC2 instance
    • S3 website (must first enable the bucket as a static S3 website)
    • Any Http backend

CloudFront vs S3 Cross Region Replication​

  • CloudFront
    • Global Edge network
    • Files are cached for TTL (maybe a day)
    • Great for static content that must be available everywhere
  • S3 Cross Region Replication
    • Must be setup for each region you want replication to happen
    • Files are updated in near real-time
    • Read only
    • Great for dynamic content that needs to be available at low-latency in few regions

Pricing​

  • The cost of data out per edge location varies
  • Three price classes
    • Price Class All: all regions - best performance
    • Price Class 200: most regions, but excludes the most expensive regions
    • Price Class 100: only the least expensive regions

Cache Invalidation​

  • In case you update the back-end origin, CloudFront doesn't know about it and will only get the refreshed content after the TTL has expired
  • However, you can force an entire or partial cache refresh (tus bypassing the TTL) by performing a CloudFront invalidation
  • You can in validate all files () or a special path (/pathname/)