- CloudFront is a CDN (Content Distribution Network). It makes website load fast by serving cached content that is nearby
- CloudFront distributes cached copy at Edge Locations
- Edge Locations aren't just not read-only , you can write them eg. PUT objects
- TTL (Time to live) defines how long until the cache expires (refreshes cache)
- When you invalidate your cache, you are forcing it to immediately expire (refreshes cached data)
- Refreshing the cache costs money because of transfer costs to update Edge locations
- Origin is the address of where the original copies of your files reside eg. S3, EC2, ELB, Route53
- Distribution defines a collection of Edge Locations and behavior on how it should handle your cached content
- Distributions has 2 Types :
- Web Distribution (statis website content)
- RTMP (steaming media)
- Origin Identity Access (OAI) is used access private S3 buckets
- Access to cached content can be protected via Signed URLs or Signed Cookies
- Lambda@Edge allows you to pass each request through a Lambda to change the behavior of the response