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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.