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Amazon CloudFront Functionality

Amazon CloudFront has a simple, web services interface that lets you get started in minutes. In Amazon CloudFront, your objects are organized into distributions. A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name (e.g. abc123.cloudfront.net) that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations. If you wish, you can also map your own domain name (e.g. images.example.com) to your distribution. You can create distributions to either download your content using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols, or stream your content using the RTMP protocol.

To use Amazon CloudFront, you:

• Store the original versions of your files in an Amazon S3 bucket.

• Create a distribution to register that bucket with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call.

• Use your distribution’s domain name in your web pages, media player, or application. When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content.

• Pay only for the data transfer and requests that you actually use.

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Service Highlights

Fast – Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your content close to end users, lowering latency when they download or stream your objects. The service also gives you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.

Simple – A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket through the Amazon CloudFront network. Or, interact with Amazon CloudFront through the AWS Management Console’s simple graphical user interface. And, since there’s no need to negotiate with a sales person, anyone can get started in just minutes.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon CloudFront is tightly integrated with Amazon S3, which holds the definitive versions of your content. Amazon CloudFront also integrates with other AWS Services, like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For instance, you can run a web server on Amazon EC2 to serve dynamic HTML pages, while delivering static content (i.e. images) through Amazon CloudFront.

Cost-Effective – Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.

Elastic – With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for popular content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.

Reliable – Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest location as required by network conditions.

Global – Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe and Asia.

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Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

United States Edge Locations

European Edge Locations

Hong Kong and Singapore Edge Locations

Japan Edge Locations

Need more than 1,000 TB of data transfer? Please contact us.

We charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the edge location through which your content is served. Usage tiers for data transfer are measured separately for each geographic region. The prices above are exclusive of applicable taxes, fees, or similar governmental changes, if any exist, except as otherwise noted. Effective January 1, 2010, the prices for usage out of Japan edge locations are inclusive of Japan consumption tax.

Origin Server

Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. Normal fees will apply for Amazon S3 usage, including “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations.

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Resources

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Detailed Description

The Amazon CloudFront Network

To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide. Amazon CloudFront uses the following edge locations:

United States

• Ashburn, VA
  
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  
• Los Angeles, CA
  
• Miami, FL
  
• New York, NY
  
• Newark, NJ
  
• Palo Alto, CA
  
• Seattle, WA
  
• St. Louis, MO
  

Europe

• Amsterdam
  
• Dublin
  
• Frankfurt
  
• London
  

Asia

• Hong Kong
  
• Tokyo
  
• Singapore
  

Working with Distributions

To deliver content through Amazon CloudFront, you create a distribution. This distribution identifies the Amazon S3 bucket that holds the original version of your content. Each distribution has a unique domain name that you can use in your web page or application. An example of an Amazon CloudFront domain name is abc123.cloudfront.net. To work with a distribution:

1. You place the original version of your objects in your Amazon S3 bucket.
2. You call the CreateDistribution API, which will return your distribution’s domain name.
3. You create links to your objects in your web site or web application using the domain name.

When a client requests a page using that domain name, Amazon CloudFront determines the best edge location to serve your content. If an edge location doesn’t have a copy of the file that the end user requests, Amazon CloudFront will get a copy from Amazon S3 and hold it at the edge location so it’s available for future requests.

Content can be delivered using either the HTTP or HTTPS protocol. By default, your distribution will accept requests on either protocol. However, if you want your content delivered only over an HTTPS connection, you can configure your distributions to only accept requests that come over HTTPS. When Amazon CloudFront needs to get a file from Amazon S3, it will use the same protocol that was used for the end user request. For example, if an end user requests a file using HTTPS that is not already in an edge location, Amazon CloudFront will use HTTPS to get the file from Amazon S3.

By default, files delivered through Amazon CloudFront are publicly readable by anyone on the Internet. However, if you require greater control over who can download or stream your files, you can use Amazon CloudFront’s private content feature. When this option is enabled, Amazon CloudFront will only deliver files or stream media when you say it is okay to do so by securely signing your requests. There is no additional charge for using the private content feature.

If you wish, you can also choose to receive more information about the traffic delivered or streamed by your Amazon CloudFront distribution by enabling access logs. Access logs are activity records that show you detailed information about each request made for your content. To use this feature, you simply specify an Amazon S3 bucket you would like to use to store access logs. There are no additional Amazon CloudFront charges for this feature, though normal Amazon S3 charges apply to write, store and retrieve access logs using that service.

By default, your distributions support peak data transfer speeds of 1,000 megabits per second and peak request rates of 1,000 requests per second. If you expect more than this amount of traffic, please request a higher limit. We will add more capacity to your distributions within 2 business days.

Streaming Distributions

Amazon CloudFront lets you create “streaming distributions” to deliver your rich media content in a different way than other Amazon CloudFront distributions. Streaming distributions deliver content to end users in real time – the end-users watch the bytes as they are delivered. To do this, streaming distributions use the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) and several of its variants, instead of the HTTP or HTTPS protocols used by other Amazon CloudFront distributions. Amazon CloudFront uses Adobe’s Flash® Media Server to power its streaming distributions.

Streaming has several potential benefits for you and your end users. Streaming can provide more flexibility in playback: with streaming, it’s easy to pause, rewind, and fast-forward a media file to whatever spot is needed, without needing to worry about how much of the file has already been downloaded to the browser. You can also configure your streaming distributions to use dynamic bit-rate streaming. When enabled, this feature lets you store multiple copies of the same video, each encoded at different quality levels. Your distribution will then automatically adjust the quality of your video based on the speed of the end user’s internet connection.

Streaming also can give you more control over your content, as no file remains on the end-user’s computer when they finish watching a video. Additionally, streaming can save you money, as it only delivers portions of a media file that the end-users actually watch. In contrast, with traditional downloads, frequently the whole media file will be downloaded by the end-users, even if they only watch a portion of the file.

Streaming distributions support the wide variety of file formats that can be played using Flash. Among the supported formats are the popular FLV and MP4 media container file formats and the VP6 and H.264 video codecs.

Like all of Amazon CloudFront, streaming distributions are designed to give you high performance, reliable delivery of your content. Streaming distributions use all the edge locations in the Amazon CloudFront network, so your content is streamed from a server that is close to your end users. There are no additional charges for streaming content; you simply pay for the amount of data that you deliver at normal Amazon CloudFront rates.

Using Amazon CloudFront with Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is the durable object store for the Internet. Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as its origin server to store the original versions of your objects.

Amazon CloudFront is designed for delivery of objects that are frequently accessed – “popular” objects. With Amazon CloudFront, copies of your popular objects are cached in a network of edge locations around the world. Because these edge locations are close to your end-users, your objects can be served more quickly than if they were served from one of Amazon S3’s central locations. This improves your end-users’ experiences for frequently accessed content: they get lower latency and faster data transfer rates. Delivering your popular objects using an Amazon CloudFront edge location can also reduce your costs, as Amazon CloudFront’s rates for data transfer rates are lower than Amazon S3’s at higher usage tiers.

However, when space is needed at an edge location, the service will remove less popular objects in order to make room for more popular ones. This means that objects that aren’t accessed frequently are less likely to remain in Amazon CloudFront’s edge locations’ caches. Thus, for less popular objects, delivery out of Amazon S3 (rather than from Amazon CloudFront) is the better choice. Amazon S3 will provide strong distribution performance for these objects, and serving them directly from Amazon S3 saves you the cost of continually copying less popular objects from Amazon S3 to the edge locations in Amazon CloudFront.

There are many great use cases for Amazon CloudFront, including:

• Hosting your most frequently accessed website components Websites often contain a small number of files that are shared by every page on the site. This can include graphics, like your site’s logo or navigational images, or supporting files such as cascading style sheets or JavaScript code. Because the same files are accessed very frequently, they are very likely to be held in cache in the edge locations, and are ideal for Amazon CloudFront.

• Distributing software Amazon CloudFront is a good choice for software developers who wish to distribute applications, updates or other downloadable software to end users. Amazon CloudFront’s high data transfer rates speed up downloading your applications, improving the customer experience and lowering your costs through the lower prices for Amazon CloudFront data transfer at higher usage tiers.

• Publishing popular media files If your application involves rich media – audio or video – that is frequently accessed, you will benefit from Amazon CloudFront’s lower data transfer prices and improved data transfer speeds.

Paying for What You Use

Amazon CloudFront is designed so you don’t have to pay any upfront fees or commit to how much content you’ll deliver through the network. Like other Amazon Web Services, you pay as you go, and only for what you use:

• Storage in the origin server You pay normal Amazon S3 storage charges to store objects in your bucket; the charges appear in the Amazon S3 portion of your AWS statement.

• Copying objects to edge locations When Amazon CloudFront receives a request for an object it doesn’t already have at an edge location, it makes a standard GET request back to Amazon S3. You incur the normal Amazon S3 charges for GET requests and for data transfer out; the charges appear in the Amazon S3 portion of your AWS statement. Amazon CloudFront copies an object to an edge location only if there is demand for that object at that edge location.

• Serving objects from edge locations You incur Amazon CloudFront charges for HTTP requests, HTTPS requests and data transfer out. The data transfer charge is lower than the corresponding Amazon S3 charges for data transfer The Amazon CloudFront charges appear in the Amazon CloudFront portion of your AWS statement.

Your monthly bill from AWS separates your usage and dollar amounts by AWS service, so you’ll see some charges for Amazon S3 and some charges for Amazon CloudFront. Your use of Amazon S3 related to your use of Amazon CloudFront is combined with any other Amazon S3 usage you may have for the month.

Getting Started

The best way to understand Amazon CloudFront is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you’ll be able to deliver content through the Amazon CloudFront network!

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Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement.