Amazon CloudFront FAQs

Q. What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that gives businesses and software developers an easy and cost effective way to distribute popular content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like all AWS Infrastructure Services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees. With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files.

Q. What can I do with Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront provides a simple API that lets you:

• Distribute content stored in Amazon S3 with low latency and high data transfer rates by serving requests using a network of edge locations around the world.

• Get started without negotiating contracts and minimum commitments.

Q. How do I get started with Amazon CloudFront?

Click the “Sign up for Amazon CloudFront” button the Amazon CloudFront detail page. You must place objects in Amazon S3 as the origin server; if you’re already using Amazon S3, you can immediately register your buckets to the Amazon CloudFront service. If you’re not yet using Amazon S3 or if you don’t yet have an AWS account, you’ll simply be also asked to sign up for these.

Q. How do I use Amazon CloudFront?

To use Amazon CloudFront, you:

• Store your objects in an Amazon S3 bucket. This bucket will serve as the “origin server” – the definitive version of your content that will be distributed through Amazon CloudFront.

• Register your Amazon S3 origin server with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call. This call will return a CloudFront.net domain name that you can use to distribute content from that bucket via the CloudFront service. For instance, registering the Amazon S3 bucket “bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com” might return “E123456.cloudfront.net.”

• Include the cloudfront.net domain name in the appropriate spots in your web application, media player, or website. Each request made using the cloudfront.net domain name is routed to the edge location best suited to deliver the content with the highest performance. The edge location will attempt to serve the request with a local copy of the file. If a local copy is not available, CloudFront will get a copy from Amazon S3. This copy is then available at that edge location for future requests.

Q. How does Amazon CloudFront provide higher performance?

Amazon CloudFront employs a network of edge locations that cache copies of popular files close to users on the internet. Amazon CloudFront ensures that end-user requests are served by the closest edge location. As a result, requests travel shorter distances to request objects, improving performance.

Q. How does Amazon CloudFront lower my costs to distribute content over the Internet?

Like other AWS services, Amazon CloudFront has no minimum commitments and charges you only for what you use. Compared to hosting files yourself, Amazon CloudFront spares you from the expense and complexity of operating a network of cache servers in multiple sites across the internet and eliminates the need to over-provision capacity in order to serve potential spikes in traffic.

Q. How is Amazon CloudFront different from Amazon S3?

Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as its origin store to hold the definitive, original versions of your content. Amazon CloudFront is a good choice for distribution of frequently accessed content that benefits from edge delivery—like popular website images, videos, media files or software downloads. Amazon S3 will continue to be the solution of choice for delivering content where individual objects are only accessed infrequently, as you will save the costs of copying less popular objects from Amazon S3 to the edge locations used by CloudFront.

Q. How is Amazon CloudFront different from traditional content delivery solutions?

Amazon CloudFront lets you quickly obtain the benefits of high performance content delivery without negotiated contracts or high prices. Amazon CloudFront gives all developers access to inexpensive, pay-as-you-go pricing – with a self-service model. Developers also benefit from tight integration with other Amazon Web Services. The solution is simple to use with Amazon S3 as an origin server, giving developers a powerful combination of durable storage and high performance delivery.

Q. What is the price of Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront charges are based on actual usage of the service in three areas: the origin server (Amazon S3), Data Transfer and Requests.

• Origin Server

Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. You will be charged separately at regular rates for Amazon S3 usage, including “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront. These charges will appear on your Amazon S3 bill.

• Data Transfer

You will be charged for the volume of data transferred out of the Amazon CloudFront edge locations, measured in GB. Usage tiers for data transfer are measured separately for each geographic region. You can see the rates for data transfer here.

• Requests

You will be charged for number of requests made for your content. You can see the rates for requests here.

Usage tiers for data transfer are measured separately for each geographic region. The prices above are exclusive of applicable taxes, fees, or similar governmental charges, 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.

Q. Where are the edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront uses 14 edge locations in major markets worldwide. Eight are in the United States (Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO). Four are in Europe (Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London). Two are in Asia (Hong Kong, Tokyo).

Q. What types of content does Amazon CloudFront support?

Amazon CloudFront supports all files that can be served over HTTP. This includes any popular content, such as website images, audio, video, media files or software downloads. For media files, you can also choose to stream your content using RTMP delivery.

Q. Does Amazon CloudFront support access controls for paid or private content?

Yes, Amazon CloudFront has an optional private content feature. When this option is enabled, Amazon CloudFront will only deliver files when you say it is okay to do so by securely signing your requests.

Q. Does Amazon CloudFront support CNAMEs?

Yes. You can add up to ten CNAMEs to each of your distributions.

Q. How do I to remove an item from edge locations?

Simply delete the object from your Amazon S3 bucket. As content in the edge locations reaches the expiration period defined in each object’s HTTP header, it will be removed. In the event that offensive or potentially harmful material needs to be removed before the specified expiration time, you can contact AWS who will work to remove it in a timely fashion.

Q. Does CloudFront support streaming protocols?

Yes. With Amazon CloudFront, you can create streaming distributions for your on-demand content. These streaming distributions use Adobe’s Flash® Media Server (version 3.5) to deliver your content using the RTMP protocol and several of its variants.

Q. What is streaming? Why would I want to stream my content?

Generally, streaming refers to proprietary protocols that are used to deliver audio and video to end users on the internet. These protocols are different than the HTTP protocol used to deliver web pages and other content because streaming protocols deliver content in real time – the end-users watch the bytes as they are delivered.

Streaming content has several potential benefits for you and your end-users:

• Streaming can give end-users more control over their viewing experience. For instance, it is easier for a viewer to seek forward in a video using streaming than using traditional download delivery.
• Streaming can give you more control over your content, as no file remains on the end-user’s computer when they finish watching a video.
• Streaming can help you reduce your costs, and 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.

You can only stream audio and video files – for other types of content, you should use CloudFront’s HTTP delivery. Likewise, if you do want users to retain a local copy of your audio or video file for offline playback, you should use HTTP delivery too.

Q. Does CloudFront support live streaming?

Not at this point, but we intend to add this capability in the future. Many customers already use Amazon EC2 to stream live content.

Q. Can I use CloudFront if I expect usage peaks higher than 1,000 Mbps or 1,000 RPS?

Yes. Complete our request for higher limits here, and we will add more capacity to your account within two business days.

Q: Is there a limit to the number of distributions my Amazon CloudFront account may deliver?

Each Amazon CloudFront account is limited to a maximum of 100 distributions.

Q: What tools and libraries work with Amazon CloudFront?

There are a variety of tools for managing your Amazon CloudFront distribution and libraries for various programming languages available in our resource center.

Q: Can I get access to request logs for content delivered through Amazon CloudFront?

Yes. When you create or modify a CloudFront distribution, you can enable access logging. When enabled, this feature will automatically write detailed log information in a W3C extended format into an Amazon S3 bucket that you specify. We intend to make access logs for streaming distributions available in the future.

Q: Can I use the AWS Management Console with Amazon CloudFront?

Yes. You can use the AWS Management Console to configure and manage Amazon CloudFront though a simple, point-and-click web interface. The AWS Management Console supports all of Amazon CloudFront’s features, letting you get Amazon CloudFront’s low latency delivery without writing any code or installing any software. Access to the AWS Management Console is provided free of charge at https://console.aws.amazon.com