Did you come across Amazon Web Services(AWS) CloudFront and how it operates while browsing the internet? Amazon Web Services with CloudFront is known to be one of the best web services which are useful in the static and dynamic web content distribution to the main end users. The web content may include files that have extensions such as .html, .css, .js, and image files. Not only is CloudFront a powerful medium to deliver your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations but it also routes the user to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
Now if any content is not available in that particular edge location, CloudFront tends to retrieve it from a specific origin that you may have defined beforehand, for instance, an HTTP server, Amazon S3 bucket, a MediaPackage channel etc. that will help in easy identification of the source for the definitive version of your content that is to be delivered.
Since AWS is one of the most popular cloud service providers, it is a must for any newbie who is looking to become a cloud expert. If you want to learn more about AWS in a new and fun way with 3 amazing projects, and 50 hours of video content then you can help us bring our amazing AWS certification program to life! All you need to do is to support our Indiegogo campaign.
How To Set Up CloudFront to Deliver Content
Given below are the crucial steps that you must follow so that you can deliver content in a convenient way. The main process involves the creation of a CloudFront distribution that will help CloudFront to know from where your content needs to be delivered from and all the important details that will be useful to track as well as manage the content delivery in an efficient way. Also, CloudFront makes use of highly computational computers and edge servers that helps in delivering the content in an effective way whenever a user wants to see it and make use of it.
Configuring The CloudFront To Deliver Your Content
1. Start by specifying the origin servers, such as an Amazon S3 bucket or any other server, so that CloudFront easily gets an access to your files that will be then distributed from CloudFront’s different edge locations from around the world.
2. Now an origin server that will store the original, definitive version of all your objects is set up. In this case, while you serve the content over the HTTP network, the origin server will either be an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server which is your web server. These servers on which you manage this stuff are called custom origins. Now your HTTP server can run on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance or on a custom server that you can easily manage.
3. Also, if you are making use of the Adobe Media Server RTMP protocol for the media files distribution work on demand, your origin server is always an Amazon S3 bucket.
4. After you upload your files to your particular origin servers, your files which are also known as objects typically will comprise of several different media files, web pages, and images etc. which can be served over HTTP or any other supported version of Adobe RTMP. This protocol is commonly used by Adobe Flash Media Server.
5. On completing this, you make use of an Amazon S3 bucket for the origin server, this will allow you to easily make the objects in your bucket publicly readable, for everyone who has the knowledge of the CloudFront URLs for your objects will be able to access them. Thus, there an option that allows you to keep such objects private and controls the access to them.
6. Also, you may create a CloudFront distribution that will tell CloudFront which origin servers will be used to get your files whenever the users request for the files via your website or app. Not only this, but you may also provide brief details of simple things like if you want CloudFront to log all requests as well as if you want the content distribution to be enabled just as you complete developing it.
7. It must be noted that CloudFront will assign a proper domain name to this new distribution that you have developed and is available in the CloudFront console also, it will be helpful in getting a response to the API request whenever made.
8. CloudFront will be useful in sending your distribution’s configuration (except your content) to all of its edge locations which are collections of servers placed in different geographical locations to create copies of your objects and CloudFront caches it.
9. Whenever you develop your website or application, you will make use of the domain name that will be provided by CloudFront for your URLs. Let us cite an example to explain this, if CloudFront returns d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net as the domain name for your distribution, the URL for pic.jpg in your Amazon S3 bucket (or in the root directory on an HTTP server) will become http://d11jdbusuhcdef8.cloudfront.net/pic.jpg and you may configure your CloudFront distribution so that you can make use of your own domain name. Also in such case, the URL will become http://www.yoursiteexample.com/pic.jpg.
10. This step is optional in which you can configure your origin server for adding headers to the files, that will indicate how long you want the files to stay in the cache in CloudFront edge locations. By default, the service allows each object to stay in an edge location for 24 hours and then, it expires. The minimum expiration time is 0 seconds whereas there is no maximum expiration time limit on it.
In this way, we can create a content distribution network for our site enabling users ease to access it with Amazon’s services.
Prominent Features and Applications of using Amazon’s CloudFront Service
1. Speed up the Content Distribution: Using Amazon’s CloudFront services will help you get the access to the content in a faster way and via the proper routing mechanism. Like if you are serving an image from a traditional web server and not from CloudFront. You might serve an image, plasticsurgery.png, using the URL http://example.com/plasticsurgery.png.
Without any idea of how your request was routed from one network to another and shown to you. CloudFront enhances the content distribution speed by routing each user request through the AWS backbone network to the edge location that can easily serve your content. Using the AWS network dramatically reduces the number of networks that your users’ requests must pass through, which improves performance. Users get lower latency which is the time it takes to load the first byte of the file and helps in higher data transfer rates.
2. Improved Reliability: Using Amazon’s CloudFront, your reliability will boost up as you will be taken through secure channels to make your content available to you. Not only this, you will be sure that the data came through the right way and you shall feel good.
3. Increased Availability: Owing to a large number of copies of your files (called the objects) which are now held (or cached) in multiple edge locations all over the world, the users will get access to the content whenever they want to have it as the availability of content has been segregated.
Conclusion
All-in-all, Amazon CloudFront service is known to be the perfect Content Delivery service that will be responsible for faster content delivery and will be useful to enhance the availability and reliability of content for the end users. People must configure these services for faster delivery of your files to the end users.
