It's a content delivery network (CDN), a system of distributed servers that deliver webpages and other web content to users based on their geographic location, the origin of tha page and content delivery server
- Can be used to delivery your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming and interactive content using AWS global network of edge locations
- Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so it is delivered with the best possible performance
- Is usually used to optimize performance for users accessing a website backed by S3
- Content is distributed to edge locations and cached
- It is separate to an AWS region/AZ (there are much more edge locations)
- Origin is the original location of the files, can be a S3 bucket, EC2 instance, ELB or Route53
- Distribution is the name of the CDN, consists of a collection of edge locations, which can be of two types:
- Web Distribution for webistes (HTTP/HTTPS)
- RTMP Distribution for media streaming / flash multi-media content (Adobe Real Time Messaging Protocol)
- Cache expires automatically in a given TTL (default 24h), you can clear it manually at any time, but you will be charged
- Is optmizied to work with other AWS services, such as S3, EC2, ELB and more, but can also be used with any non-AWS origin server, which stores the original, definitive versions of your files
- Edge location are not just read only, you can write too, to PUT an object on S3 bucket for example
- Edge locations are used by S3 Transfer Acceleration to reduce latency for S3 uploads
- You can restrict bucket access to enforce all requests to go through CloudFront
- You can restrict content access using signed URLs or signed cookies, a common use case is to distribute paid content
- Geo-Restrictions can be used to allow/deny access per geographic location
- You can use alternate domains names with HTTPS
- If you want to require HTTPS between viewers and CloudFront, you must change the AWS Region to US East (N. Virginia) in the AWS Certificate Manager console before you request or import a certificate