Content Delivery Service(CDN)

A CDN mechanism is used to deliver content quickly and efficiently based on geographic location.

Note: Latency means the time it takes to respond to a request. Low latency is good!

Amazon CloudFront

CloudFront is a CDN that delivers data and applications globally with low latency.

Features:

1. Makes connections available globally or restricts them based on the location.
2. Speeds up delivery of static and dynamic web content.
3. Uses edge locations to cache content.

What if your content is not on edge location? Let’s see. How does it work:

1. Users send requests from the browser.
2. Request first go to CloudFront distributions(collection of edge locations).
   1. If the response to the request is available at the distribution center the response will be given from the distribution center only. Else,
   2. The request then moves to the origin(original source) of the service and the response will get placed at distribution centers and further responded to users.

Uses:

1. S3 static websites
2. Prevent attacks
3. IP address blocking

Amazon Global Accelerator

Global Accelerator sends your users through the AWS global network when accessing your content, speeding up delivery.

Features:

1. Improves latency and availability of single-Region applications.
2. Sends traffic through the AWS global network infrastructure.
3. 60% performance boost.
4. Automatically re-routes the traffic to healthy available regional endpoints.

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

S3 Transfer Acceleration improves content uploads and downloads to and from S3 buckets.

Features:

1. Fast transfer of files over a long distance.
2. Uses CloudFront’s globally distributed edge locations.
3. Customers around the world can upload to a central bucket.

Important for the exam:

1. Don’t forget CloudFront allows for global distribution of content.
2. Remember Global Accelerator provides low latency.
3. Don’t forget CloudFront has security features like DDoS protection and geo-restriction.
4. Remember S3 transfer acceleration provides fast transfer of files over long distances.