CloudFront Review

Detailed Reviews

Amazon Cloudfront is a content delivery service provided by Amazon Web Services, Inc., a division of Amazon.com, Inc., the biggest e-commerce company in the world. The service was launched in 2006, with the main headquarter located in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Dynamic Content Delivery

AWS Cloudfront provides a dynamic content delivery that allows you to deliver your dynamic content in the best possible way. This way, a part of your content that keeps growing with time will be delivered globally without any additional cost. This feature includes Geo targeting, device detection, CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing), query string parameter, HTTP cookies, and more. The feature allows you to keep your site at high performance even when delivering user-generated content or other type of dynamic content to the end users.

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console allows you to control your AWS account from anywhere. You can access it via web browser as well as mobile device, with various features that you can use within the console. Within the management console, you can monitor your account activities, manage security information, and set up new IAM users. On the mobile device, the AWS Management Console provides CloudWatch alarm to keep your resource usage in check.

POST, PUT, and Other HTTP Methods

These clusters of features allow you to stabilize your website performance when it comes to dynamic content creation. Without a proper CDN platform, your dynamic website may perform poorly due to a lot of activities going on with the server, especially during the uploading and downloading process. The POST, PUT, and other HTTP methods are meant to smooth the process of content creation within your website by the end users, meaning that they will not feel any lag or performance gap within your website during their uploading and downloading activities, even in peak traffic.

Security Features

AWS Cloudfront offers advanced security features that you can use to protect your content and deliver it via secure encryption. The private content feature allows you to manage the users who can download your content. This will restrict regular users from accessing and downloading your content. There is also a Geo restriction feature that allows you to restrict specific regions that your content can be delivered to. HTTPS redirection allows you to redirect HTTP request to HTTPS and thus secure the delivery of your content. Also, there is an advanced SSL feature that provides more security for you, such as Perfect Forward Secrecy and Session Tickets.

Reporting Features

AWS Cloudfront provides advanced reporting features that help you to monitor your CDN usage in real time accurately. Cache Statistic Reports provide the history of your caching process, with analysis on cache hit rate and error rate. Popular Object Reports provide you with the list of the most popular content within your CDN platform, giving you the idea about your best products and services. Viewer Reports provide information regarding those who access your content. Referrer Reports provide information about the pages that are referring to your content.

Streaming Features

AWS Cloudfront gives high-performance streaming for the end users. So, if you want to stream your video on your website, the AWS Cloudfront can deliver it in the most reliable way. It supports on-demand Microsoft Smooth Streaming, live streaming with Adobe Media Server 5.0, live streaming with Windows Media Services, and live streaming with Wowza.

Conclusion

AWS Cloudfront provides one of the most reliable content delivery network for your website. You can even host the entire website on the AWS Cloudfront platform to ensure maximum performance for your website. With solid security features, complete and detailed reports, good streaming features, and three different pricing plans (which include Pay As You Go plan), AWS is worth to try. It is also worth to mention about the free-tier plan, which you can always use first if you are still in doubt regarding the quality of the service.