Understanding CloudFront Origin Groups

What is CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by AWS.

• CDN provides a globally-distributed network of proxy servers that cache content, i.e., web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, thus improving access speed for downloading the content.

• CloudFront service works on a pay-as-you-go basis.

• CloudFront works with origin servers like S3, EC2 where the content is stored and is pushed out to multiple CloudFront servers as content is requested.

• When CloudFront is enabled, the content is stored on the main S3 server.

• Copies of this content are created on a network of servers around the world called CDN.

• Each server within this network is called an Edge server, which will only have a copy of your content.

• When a request is made to the content, the user is provided from the nearest edge server.

• CloudFront has features similar to dynamic site acceleration, a method used to improve online content delivery.

• CloudFront accelerates the delivery of dynamic content by moving it closer to the user to minimize the internet hops involved in retrieving the content.

• CloudFront’s Web distribution supports “Progressive” download i.e., data from S3 is cached and then streamed without disruptions.

• Due to that, the user cannot move front or back in the video i.e., the video is processed bit by bit.

• CloudFront’s Web distribution support “Streaming” allows users to directly watch without any download.

• Due to that, the user can move front or back in the video, the latency is based on the size of the file and the customer’s Internet bandwidth.

• This service is beneficial for those developing a website that distributes a lot of content and needs to scale up.

• It helps reduce costs and improve the performance of a website by providing high data transfer speeds and low latency.