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Amazon CloudFront

Content delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds
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What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.
Amazon CloudFront is a tool in the Content Delivery Network category of a tech stack.

Who uses Amazon CloudFront?

Companies
8565 companies reportedly use Amazon CloudFront in their tech stacks, including Airbnb, Pinterest, and Spotify.

Developers
12150 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon CloudFront Integrations

Gatsby, Buddy, Sumo Logic, Beanstalk, and Filestack are some of the popular tools that integrate with Amazon CloudFront. Here's a list of all 31 tools that integrate with Amazon CloudFront.
Pros of Amazon CloudFront
245
Fast
166
Cdn
157
Compatible with other aws services
125
Simple
108
Global
41
Cheap
36
Cost-effective
27
Reliable
19
One stop solution
9
Elastic
1
Object store
1
HTTP/2 Support
Decisions about Amazon CloudFront

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Amazon CloudFront in their tech stack.

Shared insights
on
GitHubGitHub
at

Github Actions has been a breeze to work with. Github Actions offers a nice CI/CD service right inside the Github environment itself. It comes with tight integration with Github. Github Actions workflows are triggered based on a variety of events, such as: commit, pull request, comment...etc.

At Cereo, we serve our Webpack bundle from Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. We're using Github Actions to build bundles, upload them to S3, and invalidate Cloudfront cache. Our codebase is a monorepo with multiple apps. Github Actions lets us check updates using paths so that we can limit executions. Sometimes a pull request still triggers multiple workflows, but we get to run them concurrently with Github Actions. In fact, Github Actions can run up to 20 concurrent jobs.

That being said, don't try to change your entire CI/CD solution in one afternoon. Github Actions is still new to the market. Start small and build your new shiny CI system up.

#CI #ContinuousIntegration #ContinuousDelivery

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Simon Bettison
Managing Director at Bettison.org Limited · | 8 upvotes · 748.9K views
Shared insights
at

In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.

Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.

PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.

Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!

Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.

We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).

Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service

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Priit Kaasik
Engineering Lead at Katana MRP · | 8 upvotes · 330.5K views
Shared insights
at

Sometimes #ad-blocking addons can cause a real headache when working with JavaScript apps. Onboarding assistants (Appcues + elevio ), chat (Intercom) and product usage insight (Hotjar) have all landed on their blacklists. I guess there is a perfectly good reason for this that I just don't know.

In order to fix this, we had to set up our own content delivery service. We chose Amazon CloudFront and Amazon S3 to do the job because it has a good synergy with Heroku PaaS we are already using.

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Blog Posts

Amazon CloudFront's Features

  • Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.
  • Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.
  • Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.
  • Cost-Effective- Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.
  • Elastic- With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for your content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.
  • Reliable- Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest available location as required by network conditions.
  • Global- Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.

Amazon CloudFront Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Amazon CloudFront?
Akamai
If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.
CloudFlare
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
Google Cloud Storage
Google Cloud Storage allows world-wide storing and retrieval of any amount of data and at any time. It provides a simple programming interface which enables developers to take advantage of Google's own reliable and fast networking infrastructure to perform data operations in a secure and cost effective manner. If expansion needs arise, developers can benefit from the scalability provided by Google's infrastructure.
Fastly
Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.
MaxCDN
The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.
See all alternatives

Amazon CloudFront's Followers
10535 developers follow Amazon CloudFront to keep up with related blogs and decisions.