AWS Cloud Practitioner: CloudFront

In this short series, I outline the notes that I took while preparing for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam.

These are my personal notes that I have made while working through the A Cloud Guru exam practitioner course. They are in no way official notes from AWS.

I would advise you that if you do use my notes to help you revise for this exam, that you use them as a supplement to the most recent information in the White PapersExam Guide and go over your knowledge with practice exam papers.

Previous notes within this blog series:

CloudFront

  • CloudFront is Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • CDN’s are a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other web content to a user based on the geographical locations of the user, the origin of the webpage, and the content delivery server.
  • The type of content can include dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content.
  • Optimised to work with other AWS services like S3, EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Route53.
  • Can also work with non-AWS origin server which stores the original definitive versions of your file
  • Time to live (TTL) is the amount of time the file is cached for in seconds. Objects are cached for the life of the TTL.
  • You can clear your cached objects but you will be charged.

Edge Location – Locations where content will be cached. This is separate to an AWS Region/Availability Zone. As close to the user as possible. Not only READ only, you can write to them too.

Origin – Content comes from an origin. The origin of all the files that the CDN will distribute e.g an S3 Bucket, an EC2 Instance, and Elastic Load Balancer, or Route53

Distribution – Name given to the CDN which consists of a collection of Edge Locations.

  • Type 1 – Web Distribution – Typically used for websites
  • Type 2 – RTMP – Used for Media Streaming e.g. Flash

CloudFront is simply a way to cache big objects in the cloud.

You must disable a CloudFront distribution before you delete it.

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