Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront routes user requests through the AWS global network of over 600 Points of Presence (PoPs) across 50+ countries, automatically routing traffic to the nearest edge location using Amazon's custom-built, highly optimized network backbone. Key features include: edge caching of static and dynamic content (caching at edge locations to reduce origin load and latency), TLS 1.3 support with free SSL/TLS certificates managed by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), integration with AWS services including S3 (for static asset hosting), EC2 and ALB (for dynamic content), Lambda@Edge (running serverless functions at edge locations for request/response manipulation, A/B testing, and user authentication), CloudFront Functions (lightweight JavaScript functions for HTTP header manipulation and URL rewriting at the edge with sub-millisecond execution), origin access control (OAC) for secure S3 access, field-level encryption for protecting sensitive data like PII, signed URLs and signed cookies for premium content distribution with expiration and IP restrictions, geo-restriction (allowlisting or blocklisting countries), real-time metrics and logging via CloudWatch, access logging to S3 for detailed request analysis, WebSocket support for real-time applications, HTTP/3 (QUIC) support, compressed responses (Gzip and Brotli), response headers policies for security headers (CORS, HSTS, Content-Security-Policy), cache behavior rules with path-based routing to different origins, origin groups for active-active and active-passive failover, and pay-as-you-go pricing with no minimum commitments.