What is Cloud Front in AWS ?

Cloudfront is CDN (Content Delivery Network) based service which deliver/distribute the content such as webpages or media files to your users with the help of edge locations of AWS cloud in worldwide. It uses the routing protocols to determine the best available route (low latency) to deliver the content to your users.

-if the data is stored in nearest edge location then content deliver from the edge location

-if it is not there then the data is fetched from the original location & store that copy to edge location &  forward to user.

Key Terminology of CloudFront:

• Edge Location : The location where the data is temporary stored/cached.
• Origin :The main source of the content . It might be your S3 bucket or EC2 instance or Any WebServer.
• Distribution : This is the name given to the CDN which consists of a collection of Edge location.
• Web Distribution: used for Websites
• RTMP: used for media streaming
  

How It Configured: You have to create the CloudFront Distribution in order to enable the cloudfront, it will take all the configuration e.g where from it will get the data, how long the copies of data  will be stored in edge location & details about how the data will be tracked.Then the cloudfront store a copy of data to the nearest edge location when it will be requested.

How It Works:

As shown in above picture when a user request for data (webpage ,media file etc) for the very first time , the request goes to the  cloudfront , and it makes a copy of that data & make it available to the nearest edge location to the user , so when the next time user request for the same page it will be deliver from the edge location. by default data will be stored in edge location for minimum 24Hrs.

Remember:

• Edge location are not read only you can write on them (for example : put an object on them)
• Object are cached for life of TTL(timetolive)
• When an content is requested again cloudfront verify the data to the origin source in case it is updated then again copy the original data and save to the edge location.
• If content is requested so frequently then it can be further stored to edge cache location & make it more closer to users.
• You can find the CloudFront Service  under the Netwroking & Content Delivery in AWS console home page.