Amazon CloudFront Information Reviews & Insights

It is used to deliver images on the website so that they load really fast for our users and the end user experience is optimized.

It is really well suited when you want to serve some static content really fast and in an optimized way.

It is not as good for something where you need to modify the content before it is served. You then need to use something like Lambda on the edge. While some competitors have made it simpler.

Cloudflare

Cloudfront is one of the oldest CDN with presence in a lot of locations. This really helps in making the content load faster in all the locations globally. Other products have also caught up with this but still AWS has a lot of other services which can be connected with the CDN which helps overall.

We've used Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to increase the availability of resources across multiple geographic regions while minimizing our need for EC2 instances to deliver such content. From a simple form of hosting website content (CSS, JS, Images) along with building products to utilize Amazon CloudFront as a more friendly manner to serve content within S3 and other origins.

CacheFly CDN

Because our products are built and utilize other AWS features, it was easiest to implement Amazon CloudFront based on initial environment configuration. Other CDNs were easier to get started with but required manual intervention to update overtime.

[It's] Used within the engineering department as our CDN for both the consumer-facing and B2B portions of our business. The graphics team needs access for asset uploads, etc. It helps us to quickly deliver heavy assets globally and in a way which is not developer-dependent. This is key with multiple departments using the product.

It's great for engineers who know what they're doing, but you don't want to bug an engineer every time you want to update an image asset. The process of uploads and invalidations can be too complex for non-technical staff, which can bottleneck content delivery and updates.

CloudFlare and Akamai

We ended up selecting CloudFront because we were already using an Amazon stack. To be honest, since we were already in the ecosystem there was little reason to deviate once we saw pricing was comparable.

We are currently using it as our asset server sitting on top of S3. This addresses the problem of S3 being repeatedly hit when serving an asset, and can instead serve a cached version.

It is great if you are serving a lot of static content. If you have pages with lots of images, this is very useful to reduce the number of requests directly to S3.

CloudFlare

We went with CloudFront primarily because we have all of our other services with Amazon already. We are using EC2, S3, Elastic Beanstalk, and are very familiar with the interface. It did not disappoint.

Amazon CloudFront is a great CDN choice for applications that are already deployed to the Amazon/AWS stack. The value potential there is clear: first-party support with S3, EC2, etc. As a result, for customers that are already invested in the AWS ecosystem, using CloudFront is a logical choice. We use it across our own organization, and it fits into the CDN use case for most customers with AWS deployments. Like any CDN, CloudFront helps offload repetitive work from your main application logic, and, depending on how you configure it, can greatly speed up content downloads for end users.

Amazon CloudFront shines as an addition to an organization that's already invested in the Amazon stack, and would rather pay a bit more for the ease of having all their services covered by a single provider. It shines less where cost is the central concern, or more advanced analytics are needed at edge sites.

CloudFront is well-suited for a particular use case with its native tie-ins to other Amazon/AWS services, like S3. If choosing from a platform-specific CDN, we tend to go with whichever CDN is available for use on that platform (e.g. Google or Azure). In rare cases we might suggest a lower-cost CDN for use cases where the cost of bandwidth is of top importance, but these cases tend to be unusual.