1. What is Amazon CloudFront and how does it work?
Answer: Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront works by caching content at edge locations around the world, so when a user requests content, it is served from the nearest edge location, reducing latency and improving performance.
2. What are the use cases for Amazon CloudFront?
Answer: Some common use cases for Amazon CloudFront include accelerating static website content delivery, serving video on demand or live streaming video, encrypting specific fields throughout system processing, customizing at the edge, and serving private content by using Lambda@Edge customizations.
3. How do I set up Amazon CloudFront to deliver content?
Answer: To set up Amazon CloudFront to deliver content, you need to create a distribution, which is a configuration that tells CloudFront where to find the content to be delivered, how to route requests for that content, and how long to cache the content at the edge locations. You can create a distribution using the CloudFront console, API, or SDKs.
4. How does Amazon CloudFront handle pricing and billing?
Answer: Amazon CloudFront pricing is based on the amount of data transferred and the number of requests made. There are also additional charges for features like HTTPS, field-level encryption, and invalidation requests. CloudFront offers a savings bundle for customers who commit to a minimum usage level for one year. Billing for CloudFront is integrated with the rest of AWS, and customers can view their usage and costs in the AWS Management Console.
5. How can I optimize caching and availability with Amazon CloudFront?
Answer: To optimize caching and availability with Amazon CloudFront, you can use features like caching with edge locations, improving your cache hit ratio, specifying how long CloudFront caches your objects, using Origin Shield, caching based on query string parameters, and using field-level encryption. Additionally, you can use CloudFront geographic restrictions to restrict content to specific regions or countries, and use AWS WAF to control access to your content.