Amazon CloudFront enables configurable origin connection attempts and origin connection timeouts

Posted on: Jun 11, 2020

Amazon CloudFront now provides you even more control over the connection behaviors between CloudFront and your origin. You can now configure the number of connection attempts CloudFront will make to your origin and the origin connection timeout for each attempt. In addition, the CloudFront origin response timeout range has been expanded and you can now change the value from 1 to 60 seconds, where previously the minimum value was 4 seconds. These two new configurations can be individually set for any type of origin within your CloudFront distribution and can also be used to further enhance the responsiveness and availability of your multi-origin application when coupled with CloudFront Origin Failover.

For example, you can use CloudFront’s Origin Failover to create high-availability applications with a primary and secondary origin. By using these new origin connection configurations, you can more quickly cycle through Origin Group failover conditions and provide a faster response to the viewer request. For some use cases, like streaming video content, if the primary origin is unresponsive, you might want CloudFront to fail over to the secondary origin in as little as 1 connection attempt with a 1 second timeout. Having a tighter threshold on origin connection behaviors can help minimize video buffering by quickly fetching the video segment from the secondary origin or giving the player time to execute its own retry logic.

These new features are available today at no additional charge. You can use the AWS Management Console, Amazon CloudFront APIs, or AWS CloudFormation to configure these values. To learn more about these new configurations, refer to CloudFront's documentation. To get started with CloudFront, visit the CloudFront product page.