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Getting Started with AWS CloudFront

Welcome to AWS CloudFront​

CloudFront is AWS's Content Delivery Network (CDN). It sits in front of your S3 bucket or EC2 server and caches your content at over 400 edge locations around the world — so a user in Tokyo gets assets served from a Tokyo server, not from your us-east-1 origin.

For a React app served from S3, CloudFront is the difference between a 2-second load time in Asia and a 200ms load time. It's also required to use HTTPS with a custom domain on S3.

What You'll Learn​

  • Distributions — the CloudFront resource that wraps your origin
  • Origins — S3 buckets, EC2/ALB, or any HTTP server as the source
  • Edge locations vs. regional caches — how CloudFront's two-tier caching works
  • Cache behaviors — different caching rules per URL path (/api/* vs. /*)
  • TTL and invalidations — controlling how long content is cached and how to clear it
  • HTTPS with ACM — using AWS Certificate Manager for a free SSL cert on CloudFront
  • Custom domain — pointing yourapp.com to a CloudFront distribution via Route 53
  • S3 + CloudFront pattern — the standard setup for hosting a static frontend

Prerequisites​

  • An AWS account
  • An S3 bucket (for static sites) or a running EC2/load balancer (for dynamic apps)
  • Basic understanding of how HTTP caching works