Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service.

Amazon CloudFront has a simple, web services interface that lets you get started in minutes. In Amazon CloudFront, your objects are organized into distributions. A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name (e.g. abc123.cloudfront.net) that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations. If you wish, you can also map your own domain name (e.g. images.example.com) to your distribution.

To use Amazon CloudFront, you:

• Store the original versions of your files in an Amazon S3 bucket.
• Create a distribution to register that bucket with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call.
• Use your distribution’s domain name in your web pages or application. When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content.