Customizing at the edge with functions

With Amazon CloudFront, you can write your own code to customize how your CloudFront distributions process HTTP requests and responses. The code runs close to your viewers (users) to minimize latency, and you don’t have to manage servers or other infrastructure. You can write code to manipulate the requests and responses that flow through CloudFront, perform basic authentication and authorization, generate HTTP responses at the edge, and more.

The code that you write and attach to your CloudFront distribution is called an edge function. CloudFront provides two ways to write and manage edge functions:

• CloudFront Functions – With CloudFront Functions, you can write lightweight functions in JavaScript for high-scale, latency-sensitive CDN customizations. The CloudFront Functions runtime environment offers submillisecond startup times, scales immediately to handle millions of requests per second, and is highly secure. CloudFront Functions is a native feature of CloudFront, which means you can build, test, and deploy your code entirely within CloudFront.

• Lambda@Edge – Lambda@Edge is an extension of AWS Lambda that offers powerful and flexible computing for complex functions and full application logic closer to your viewers, and is highly secure. Lambda@Edge functions run in a Node.js or Python runtime environment. You publish them to a single AWS Region, but when you associate the function with a CloudFront distribution, Lambda@Edge automatically replicates your code around the world.