Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a content-delivery web service that
speeds up the distribution of your website’s dynamic, static, and streaming content
by making it
available from a global network of edge locations. When a user requests content that
you’re
serving with Amazon CloudFront, the user is routed to the edge location that provides
the lowest latency
(time delay), so content is delivered with better performance than if the user had
accessed the
content from a data center farther away. If the content is already in the edge location
with the
lowest latency, Amazon CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not currently
in that edge
location, Amazon CloudFront retrieves it from an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server
(for example, a web
server) that you have identified as the source for the definitive version of your
content.
Amazon CloudFront caches content at edge locations for a period of time that you specify.
Amazon CloudFront supports all files that can be served over HTTP.
These files include dynamic web pages, such as HTML or PHP pages,
and any popular static files that are a part of your web
application, such as website images, audio, video, media files or
software downloads. For on-demand media files, you can also choose
to stream your content using Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP)
delivery. Amazon CloudFront also supports delivery of live media
over HTTP.
Amazon CloudFront is optimized to work with other Amazon web
services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, and
Amazon Route 53.
Amazon CloudFront also works seamlessly with any non-AWS origin
servers that store the original, definitive versions of your files.
