Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!

Linkedin Youtube

Welcome to Silicon Overdrive!

Introduction to Amazon CloudFront

Overview

We live in a busy world, where everyone is trying to get at much done as possible, as fast as possible. And thanks to the “Gig Economy”, time is an even more crucial and costly commodity than ever before.

We’ve all been in the situation where we’re trying to find something online. Maybe it’s research for work or a school paper, or perhaps we’re trying to find the perfect anniversary gift for a loved one, but the website we’re on is taking ten hours to load (we tend to get hyperbolic when waiting for web pages to load).

Google statistics tell us that most people will not wait for more than a few seconds for your page to load, instead they’re likely to leave your website, and check out your competition. In fact, loading speed is so important nowadays that Google uses it as a metric when ranking your site!

Even giant online retailers are not immune to the curse of impatience; Amazon reports the harsh reality of how they could lose $1.6 billion in sales per year for every extra second it takes their website to load.

To overcome website performance issues, there are a few things people can do, like optimising the code on your website or ensuring that the web pages aren’t too big. But considering how important high-quality images are to the overall user experience, this is not always easy or possible.

So, what can you do to increase the speed of your site? The most elegant solution is using a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. A CDN improves speed of the delivery of content through a group of servers, distributed over various locations, and caches the content at the edge. 

Amazon CloudFront is one of the most popular CDN’s on the planet, and can reduce your website latency by delivering data through 310+ globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs) with automated network mapping and intelligent routing.

How CloudFront works?

When a user requests content that you are serving with CloudFront, the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay), so that content is delivered immediately and with the best possible performance.

If the content is not in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an origin that you have defined, such as the web server, Amazon S3 bucket or streaming channel, that you have identified as the source of your content.

Lambda@Edge is an excellent feature of CloudFront that runs your code closer to users of your application, to improve performance and reduce latency. All this with zero server administration and to top it all off, you only pay for the compute time you use and will not be charged when your code is not running.

Security in the cloud is imperative, CloudFront utilises AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), and Amazon Route 53 that seamlessly work together to create a flexible, layered security perimeter against multiple types of attacks, including network and application layer DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

CloudFront’s Origin Shield is a centralized caching layer that helps increase your cache hit ratio to reduce the load on your origin. Origin Shield also decreases your origin operating costs by collapsing requests across regions, so as few as one request goes to your origin per object. Therefore, you serve the customer efficiently the first time and simultaneously save on costs as a result.

Benefits of Using Amazon CloudFront

1. Improved Security

With traffic encryption and access controls by use of Amazon Shield Standard, to defend against DDoS attacks at no additional charge.

2. Cost Savings

Cut costs with consolidated requests, personalised pricing options including pay-as-you-go, and zero fees for data transfer out from AWS origins such as AWS S3 and AWS EC2.

3. Encryption

Configurations with CloudFront over HTTPS provide secure end-to-end connections to the origin servers. In addition, you can encrypt specific fields throughout system processing.

4. Customisable

Customise the code you run at the AWS content delivery network (CDN) edge, using serverless compute features to balance cost, performance, and security.

5. Privacy

You can serve private content from your own custom origin using Lambda@Edge customizations by configuring the CloudFront distribution.

6. Developer Friendly

SDKs allow full integration with APIs and Amazon CloudFormation templates, and other developer and DevOps tooling, makes CloudFront easy to support automated IaC.

7. Availability

CloudFront’s native origin failover capability automatically serves content from a backup origin when the primary origin is unavailable.

8. Edge Computing

Redirect requests to language-specific versions of your site based on the Accept-Language header of the incoming request. Because these functions execute at all CloudFront’s edge locations, they can scale instantly to millions of requests per second with minimal effort.

9. Compliance

CloudFront infrastructure and processes are all compliant with PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, and ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, SOC (1, 2 and 3) and more to ensure secure delivery for sensitive data.

Get In Touch

Our AWS consultants are ready to help you harness the power of Amazon CloudFront and accelerate the delivery of your web content today.

If you liked this, you'll love these...

What is AWS DevOps
AWS

What is DevOps?

When we talk about DevOps, we mean an approach to IT delivery that combines people and tools that can help break down silos between development and operations teams.

May 12, 2021
Our Customers
AWS

An Introduction to AWS DevOps

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity

April 21, 2021
amazon web services logo | AWS | Silicon Overdrive
AWS

5 Key Benefits of Using AWS

Since its launch in 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the world’s leading cloud computing platform.

March 10, 2017

Trend Micro Cloud Conformity

Trend Micro Cloud OneConformity Awarded both AWS Cloud Management Tools Competency and Security Partner Competency, Cloud Conformity’s security and governance platform delivers continuous assurance that your infrastructure is compliant, secure, and optimized. You can pull instant compliance reports for major,

June 15, 2020
Trend Micro Deep Security
Security

Trend Micro Workload Security

Trend Micro Workload Security Trend Micro Workload Security is a comprehensive security and cloud protection suite that scales seamlessly and helps you maintain continuous compliance. Workload Security protects your AWS workloads against threats, malware and vulnerabilities with IPS/IDS, application control,

June 10, 2020

We use cookies to track visitors, measure ads, ad campaign effectiveness and analyze site traffic. We may also share information about your use of our site with 3rd parties. For more info, see, our Cookies Policy, our Privacy Notice. By clicking “Accept All” you agree to the storing of all cookies on your device. In case you don’t choose one of these options and use our website, we will treat it as if you have accepted all cookies.

Accept All

We use cookies to track visitors, measure ads, ad campaign effectiveness and analyze site traffic. We may also share information about your use of our site with 3rd parties. For more info, see, our Cookies Policy, our Privacy Notice. By clicking “Accept All” you agree to the storing of all cookies on your device. In case you don’t choose one of these options and use our website, we will treat it as if you have accepted all cookies.

Accept All