Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront is optimized to work with other Amazon Web Services, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53. Amazon CloudFront also works seamlessly with any non-AWS origin server, which stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services products, there are no long-term contracts or minimum monthly usage commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the content delivery service.
Key Features
Management Console
Amazon CloudFront works with the AWS Management Console. This web-based, point-and-click, graphical user interface lets you manage Amazon CloudFront without writing any code at all.
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Dynamic Content
Use Amazon CloudFront to deliver all of your content, including the dynamic portions of your site that change for each end-user.
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Support for POST/PUT and other HTTP Methods
Use CloudFront to accelerate data uploaded from end users.
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Custom SSL
Use your own domain name and your own SSL certificate to deliver content over HTTPS.
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Regional Edge Caches
Use Amazon CloudFront to deliver your content at improved performance for your viewers, while minimizing the operational burden and cost of scaling your origin resources.
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Using Amazon CloudFront with AWS Lambda
Lambda@Edge allows you to run code at global AWS edge locations without provisioning or managing servers, responding to end users at the lowest network latency.
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Invalidation
Remove copies of a file from all Amazon CloudFront edge locations.
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Wildcard CNAME Support
Map a wildcard domain name to your Amazon CloudFront distribution network.
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Zone Apex Support
Visitors to your website can now access your site at the zone apex (or “root domain”). For example, your site can be accessed as example.com instead of www.example.com.
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Custom Error Responses
Dynamic and Customized Content
Amazon CloudFront Supports Dynamic Content
Use Amazon CloudFront to deliver all of your content, including the dynamic portions of your site that change for each end-user.
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Low TTLs
Configure a minimum expiration period (also known as “time-to-live” or TTL) to as short as 0 seconds.
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Support for Cookies
Specify whether you want Amazon CloudFront to forward cookies to your custom (non-S3) origin server and, if so, which ones.
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Support for Query Strings
You can specify whether you want Amazon CloudFront to forward query strings to your custom (non-S3) origin server.
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Device Detection
Amazon CloudFront edge locations can look at the value of the User Agent header to detect the device type of all the incoming requests.
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Geo Targeting
Amazon CloudFront can also detect the country where the end users are accessing your content from.
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Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)
Amazon CloudFront may be configured to forward the Origin header value so your origin server (Amazon S3 or a custom origin) can support cross-origin access via CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).
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Forward Headers to Origin
You can use your Amazon CloudFront CDN to forward all (or a whitelist of) any of the standard HTTP request headers to your origin server.
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Reporting
Cache Statistics Reports
View more detailed metrics on your distributions including error rate, cache hit rate, and more.
Popular Objects Report
Understand which content is most popular among your viewers, or identify any issues (such as high error rates) with your most requested objects.
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Monitoring & Alarming via Amazon CloudWatch
Monitor, alarm and receive notifications on the operational performance of your Amazon CloudFront distributions using Amazon CloudWatch.
Amazon CloudFront Usage Charts
Track trends in data transfer and requests (both HTTP and HTTPS) for each of your CloudFront Web distributions.
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Access Logs
Learn how, when, where and to whom your Amazon CloudFront content is being delivered with access logs.
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Viewer Reports
Learn more about the users who access your content being delivered by Amazon CloudFront including the devices, operating systems, and browsers used as well as their location.
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Top Referrer Reports
Find out from which domains your viewers are accessing content from.
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Security
Log API calls on CloudTrail
Log configuration changes to your Amazon CloudFront distributions through AWS CloudTrail, the AWS service that records API calls for your account and delivers log files to you.
HTTP to HTTPS Redirect at the Edge
Use Amazon CloudFront to require viewers to always interact with your content over an HTTPS connection.
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Advanced SSL Features
Amazon CloudFront now supports advanced SSL features: Session Tickets, OCSP Stapling and Perfect Forward Secrecy.
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Multiple Origin Security Features
Enforce HTTPS-only connection between CloudFront and your origin webserver, Support for TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 between CloudFront and your origin webserver & add or modify request headers forwarded from CloudFront to your origin.
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Protect Your Web Applications Using AWS WAF
You can integrate your CloudFront distribution with AWS WAF, a web application firewall that helps protect web applications from attacks. Please see AWS WAF Developer Guide for more information.
Geo Restriction
Restrict content delivery end users in countries that you choose.
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PCI DSS
Amazon CloudFront is included in the set of services that are compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) at the highest level (Level 1).
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Private Content
Control who can download your files from Amazon CloudFront.
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Streaming
Support for On-demand Microsoft Smooth Streaming
Use CloudFront to deliver video using the Smooth Streaming format without the need to setup and operate any media servers.
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Live Streaming for Amazon CloudFront using Adobe Media Server 5.0
Support for both Flash-based and Apple iOS devices using Amazon CloudFront with Adobe Media Server 5.0
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Live Streaming for Amazon CloudFront Using Windows Media Services
Deliver live media over HTTP to both Microsoft Silverlight clients and Apple iOS devices.
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Live Streaming with Wowza
Live Streaming using Amazon CloudFront and Wowza Media Server.
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Pricing
Free Tier
As part of the AWS Free Usage Tier, you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 50 GB Data Transfer Out and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS Requests each month for one year.
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On-Demand Pricing
Pay only for what you use. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.
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Price Classes
Gain more control over the prices you pay to deliver content by excluding Amazon CloudFront’s more expensive edge locations from your Amazon CloudFront distributions.
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Reserved Capacity Pricing
Reserved Capacity gives you the option to commit to a minimum monthly usage level for 12 months or longer and in turn receive a significant discount.
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