Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service enables companies to deliver data, applications, APIs, and other types of content securely and at very high speeds without creating a significant burden to their own infrastructure.
CloudFront launched in 2008 as a pay-as-you-go service that’s fully integrated with other Amazon services like S3, EC2, and CloudWatch. CloudFront is highly programmable, and its Lambda@Edge feature serves to run custom code closer to end users through AWS Lambda. This makes it possible to deploy highly responsive, full-featured applications on a global scale without creating latency issues. Amazon CloudFront has more than 225 points of presence (PoPs) located across the globe.
CloudFront use cases
As one of the best-known content delivery networks on the market, CloudFront can be used to deliver static content like images and CSS code as well as dynamic content like video and motion graphics to websites, mobile apps, and software platforms. Many video streaming services like Hulu employ CloudFront for high-speed video on-demand and live streaming offerings. Similarly, software applications like Slack use CloudFront to secure and accelerate their API calls so Slack can offer its users a large number of integrations with third-party applications.
