Using Caching for Frequently Accessed Content

Many applications that store data in Amazon S3 serve a “working set” of data that is repeatedly requested by users. If a workload is sending repeated GET requests for a common set of objects, you can use a cache such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon ElastiCache, or AWS Elemental MediaStore to optimize performance. Successful cache adoption can result in low latency and high data transfer rates. Applications that use caching also send fewer direct requests to Amazon S3, which can help reduce request costs.

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) that transparently caches data from Amazon S3 in a large set of geographically distributed points of presence (PoPs). When objects might be accessed from multiple Regions, or over the internet, CloudFront allows data to be cached close to the users that are accessing the objects. This can result in high performance delivery of popular Amazon S3 content. For information about CloudFront, see the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Amazon ElastiCache is a managed, in-memory cache. With ElastiCache, you can provision Amazon EC2 instances that cache objects in memory. This caching results in orders of magnitude reduction in GET latency and substantial increases in download throughput. To use ElastiCache, you modify application logic to both populate the cache with hot objects and check the cache for hot objects before requesting them from Amazon S3. For examples of using ElastiCache to improve Amazon S3 GET performance, see the blog post Turbocharge Amazon S3 with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

AWS Elemental MediaStore is a caching and content distribution system specifically built for video workflows and media delivery from Amazon S3. MediaStore provides end-to-end storage APIs specifically for video, and is recommended for performance- sensitive video workloads. For information about MediaStore, see the AWS Elemental MediaStore User Guide.