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Amazon CloudFront

Score7.2 out of 10

111 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Amazon CloudFront?

CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.

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Reviews

What users are saying about Amazon CloudFront.
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My 2 Years Experience with CloudFront

Incentivized
Faisal ShaikhView profile
Leade Developer in Information Technology at Seeken Enterprise Private Limited (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Amazon CloudFront to serve static media content like (images & videos) to users. We wanted a solution to serve static content without latency and AWS CloudFront addressed this problem. CloudFront also helps to deliver HLS videos to users. With CloudFront, we can sign the URL and server to users with this feature URL gets expired after a certain time and if someone embedded our content then it would be inaccessible. If you want to serve HLS videos then I suggest using signed cookies instead of signed URL. With signed cookies, we do not need to append an authentication token on each URL and it gets authenticated through cookies that pass on each network call.

Pros

  • Serving HLS Videos with CloudFron Signed Cookies
  • Serving Static content on the website
  • Helps to hide your S3 bucket url in public
  • Deliver files without any latency
  • Easy to get usage statistics and logs
  • Add settings to prevent access of any particular file type

Cons

  • Integration of CloudFront Signed Cookies is difficult can provide better documentation
  • Adding custom domain is tricky sometime because we have to create certificate first and region should be N. Virginia otherwise you will not see the certificate while attaching in CloudFront settings. I think there is need of improvement here.
  • Setting CloudFront for different file type, I find difficulty when I was integrating it
  • I guess CloudFront has all the features which any CDN should have. Only a better documentation is required. Currently it is really overwhelm.

Most Important Features

  • Serving static content like images
  • Serve HLS videos with signed cookies
  • Serve the content without any latency

Return on Investment

  • CloudFront offers monthly 1 TB free bandwidth so I suppose many companies not have to pay anything in their initial period
  • After 1 TB, CloudFront could be costly (0.1 usd/GB), price could be different depending on the region but the speed we get with CLoudFront which makes totally worth it

Other Software Used

Ezoic, HubSpot CRM, ActiveCampaign, DigitalOcean Droplets, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), A2 Hosting, Zoho Mail, Google Sheets, Telegram, Discord

AWS Cloudfront review from Experience Certified Solutions Architect

Incentivized
Gnanasekar ManiView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at Brillio (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The main reason we use Cloudfront is to serve our Global Customers in a significantly faster manner. This happens through the concept called edge locations. Our static data will be present in edge locations distributed across the globe. Using this our customers will be able to interact with our website faster. Also, this improves our Customer experience as well. Also, it has inbuilt WAF(Firewall) and we can even restrict to which geography locations we need to serve our website.

Pros

  • Delivers our Content faster all over the Globe
  • Inbulit WAF
  • Inbulit Geography Restrictions
  • We can even stop the unnecassry requests
  • And Many ways to setup Cloudfront(CLI, CFT, Console)

Cons

  • Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
  • The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
  • Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper

Most Important Features

  • Able to interact with our inbulit authorizarion technique
  • More number of edge locations
  • Can be used with any service providers

Return on Investment

  • Our Organisation uses AWS extensively, so all the services cost of all the accounts are clubed together and we can get organisation discount on the cost, which in turn reduces the cost of Cloudfront as well
  • Only using CloudFront in AWS and using other service providers for other services, then the cost could be noticeably high than its competitors' pricing
  • Can be easily integrated with many services in and out of AWS

Alternatives Considered

IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network

Other Software Used

AWS CloudFormation, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS Cloud9, Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudFront is the optimal cloud solution

Incentivized
Naif Alotaibi
Infrastructure and operations department manager in Information Technology at IPA (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used Amazon CloudFront in my organization to ensure to distribute my service to many users and to make sure my service is always secure. We faced many different technical challenges the most of them is the access issues with most of our users and clients. We trying to keep up always and let our users and clients happy with our service.

Pros

  • Secure
  • easy to access
  • available all the time

Cons

  • add more function codes
  • improve the cache key normalization
  • provide the clear and detail guide for the way of use cloud front

Most Important Features

  • easy to deploy the services
  • make sure the services is secure
  • up and running all the time

Return on Investment

  • less price paid in the long term
  • let us keep improve easily with more confident

Other Software Used

Ace Cloud Hosting, 3Cloud

Great cloud experience; safe and fast deployment

Ali KazempourView profile
Information Technology Manager in Information Technology at Azerex (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy variation in server location selection
  • Extensive server and resource settings; highly configurable

Cons

  • Prices should fall a little more
  • Expenses and payments are not transparent
  • Configuration and customization could be easier with a better UI

Return on Investment

  • Speed ​​and quality beyond standard
  • Reduces organizational costs with resource management
  • Unlimited features with excellent support

Alternatives Considered

Google Cloud CDN, CDN77 and KeyCDN

Other Software Used

WordPress, CedCommerce Amazon Magento 2 Integration, WooCommerce, Contentful

Speed up static content delivery using AWS edge locations

Incentivized
Carlos Becerra
Senior Software Engineer & Project Manager in Information Technology at WiFiesta Inc (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Manage CDN properly
  • Fast and reliable
  • Distributed across the world
  • Improved way to serve existing content from S3 or other origins
  • Allows customization at edge locations

Cons

  • Skillset required for deployment (initial learning curve)
  • Need more examples of different usages and all the options available
  • The UI is not intuitive at all
  • Talking about just price, CloudFront is not the cheapest

Return on Investment

  • Replicated across the world
  • Integrated with other AWS resources and services
  • Reliable (support of the AWS infrastructure)

Alternatives Considered

Cloudflare and CacheFly CDN

Usability

Other Software Used

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Apache Tomcat, Couchbase