Working with CDNs - AWS Elemental MediaTailor

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:

  1. The player requests a manifest from the CDN with MediaTailor as the manifest origin. The CDN forwards the request to MediaTailor.

  2. 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.

  3. The player requests segments from the URLs that are provided in the manifest.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.