Lesson 19 / 28

CloudFront (CDN) Basics

Speed up delivery with CloudFront edge caching in front of S3 or a load balancer origin.

What CloudFront does

CloudFront is AWS's CDN: it caches your content (an S3 bucket, a load balancer, any HTTP origin) at edge locations worldwide, so users get it from a nearby location instead of your origin.

Origins & distributions

You create a distribution pointing at an origin (where the real content lives). CloudFront pulls from the origin on a cache miss, then serves subsequent requests from the edge cache.

Cache aggressively where safe

Static assets (images, CSS, versioned JS) can be cached for a long time or forever. Set shorter TTLs only for content that actually changes often.