Working with CDNs
We highly recommend that you use a content distribution network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront to improve the efficiency of the ad personalization and channel assembly workflow between AWS Elemental MediaTailor and your users. The benefits of a CDN include content and ad caching, consistent domain names across personalized manifests, and CDN DNS resolution.
When you use a CDN in the AWS Elemental MediaTailor workflow, the request and response flow is as follows:
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The player requests a manifest from the CDN with MediaTailor as the manifest origin. The CDN forwards the request to MediaTailor.
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MediaTailor personalizes the manifest and substitutes CDN domain names for the content and ad segment URL prefixes. MediaTailor sends the personalized manifest as a response to the CDN, which forwards it to the requesting player.
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The player requests segments from the URLs that are provided in the manifest.
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The CDN translates the segment URLs. It forwards content segment requests to the origin server and forwards ad requests to the Amazon CloudFront distribution where MediaTailor stores transcoded ads.
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The origin server and MediaTailor respond with the requested segments, and playback begins.
The following sections describe how to configure AWS Elemental MediaTailor and the CDN to perform this flow.
