A network of interconnected servers
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers that speeds up webpage loading for data-heavy applications.
CDN can stand for content delivery network or content distribution network.
When a user visits a website, data from that website's server has to travel across the internet to reach the user's computer. If the user is located far from that server, it will take a long time to load a large file, such as a video or website image. Instead, the website content is stored on CDN servers geographically closer to the users and reaches their computers much faster. The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
What you should know
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that speeds up distribution of your static and dynamic web content, such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to your users. CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations. When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront, the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency, so that content is delivered with the best possible performance.
Benefits
Worldwide content delivery network with 550+ Points of Presence and 13 regional edge caches in 100+ cities across 50 countries. Protection against various attacks. Restricting access with a number of different ways: Signed URLs and Signed Cookies, Token Authentication and geographical restriction. Caring about original server availability and redundancy to avoid spikes and disaster scenario. Edge computing capabilities for general-purpose low-latency computationally intensive operations done in closest locations.
Integration
Amazon CloudFront integrates with AWS Shield, AWS WAF, and Amazon Route 53 to create a flexible, layered security perimeter against multiple types of attacks including network and application layer DDoS attacks. AWS Certificate Manager to create SSL/TLS certificates. Amazon CloudFront is integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, and automatically publishes six operational metrics per distribution. The origin of your data can be Amazon S3, MediaStore container, Application Load Balancer, Lambda functions, Amazon EC2 or custom origin.
Use cases
With CloudFront business can accelerate static content delivery, serve video on demand, customize response at the edge, encrypt and secure access to served assets.
