All 7 Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery questions
More in Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery
What types of origins can CloudFront distribute content from? How does caching work in CloudFront, and how do you control how long content stays cached? How do you secure content delivered through CloudFront so only authorized users can access it? What role does CloudFront play in protecting applications from security threats? How do Lambda at Edge and CloudFront Functions extend the capabilities of a CloudFront distribution? How does CloudFront support multi region high availability and failover for an application?
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AWS › Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery

What is Amazon CloudFront and how does it improve website performance?

Beginner

Answer

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network service that caches copies of your website content, such as images, videos, and web pages, at edge locations physically closer to your users around the world, so requests are served from a nearby location instead of traveling all the way back to your origin server, reducing latency significantly.
aws cloudfront create-distribution --origin-domain-name mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com
Real-world example A global news website uses CloudFront so that a reader in Tokyo loads images and articles from a nearby edge location instead of waiting for content to travel from a server located in the United States.

Common follow-ups: What is an edge location and how many does AWS operate?;How does CloudFront decide which edge location serves a specific user?

S3 & Storage;VPC & Networking
All 7 Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery questions