To the bunch of the software services that you need for product development, you’re going to add one more. It is a content delivery network. The CDN is striving for automation, real-time monitoring, and data visibility that contribute to continuous delivery, and thus to DevOps practices.
Content Delivery Network
The content delivery network (also called a content distribution network) is a group of geographically distributed and interconnected proxy servers and data centers aimed to deliver digital content. A CDN stores cached content from the origin server and provides data from the nearest server so that decreases the distance for information going from the server to the clients and results in less latency, faster content delivery, higher performance, that in general improves user experience. A CDN manages the majority of web traffic including text, graphics, scripts, media files, documents, streaming and social media, and so on. Thanks to cached data it becomes possible to improve app’s security, latency, availability of content, and redundancy.
Security:
A CDN can keep a site secured with authentication and encryption improvements provided by TLS/SSL certificates.
Latency and availability of content:
A CDN works with cached data and finds the nearest way of transmitting data from the server to your computer. This brings a faster page load time. Hence, the website gets reduced bounce rates, and the user receives the information more quickly.
Redundancy:
Distributed nature of any content distributed network guarantees the traffic transmitted smoothly and hardware failure minimized.
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront is a CDN integrated with AWS that provides the benefits of the service: physical locations connected to the AWS global infrastructure, works with services such as Amazon S3, Lambda@Edge, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, or Amazon EC2 as well as other tools as APIs, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Management Console, and SDKs.
- Static asset caching;
- Video streaming;
- Software distribution;
- Security and DDoS protection;
- Dynamic and customized content;
- API acceleration.
Why CloudFront
The service emphasizes the security and content privacy, high performance, and cost-effectiveness. It is continually improving and introducing new features and enhancements (for example, in 2017, the service added AWS Shield Standard to protect the apps from DDoS attacks).
CloudFront assures network and application protection with AWS Shield Standard. It defends against common, occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks. For more advanced protection you need to use AWS Shield Advanced. It provides extra protection against complex DDoS attacks and is integrated with the AWS WAF.
Different standards of using sensitive data are also taken into account: PCI, DSS, HIPAA, and ISO. You can deliver your secure APIs or applications using SSL/TLS.
Hundreds of AWS servers and ISPs across the globe (CloudFront servers are stationed on five continents in different countries and cities, and on the whole, the service has 107 locations) fulfill the main CND functions that are to cache the data and improve the delivery of content. As a result of this, we boost the performance of applications.
Regarding pricing, Amazon always offers good deals for its clients even though it is not the cheapest option among the competitors. Amazon promises no upfront payments or fixed fees, no long-term subscriptions, and no requirements for professional services. Since we only pay for the data transfer and requests that we actually use it saves a lot of money. However, you can get a discount for a long-term contract or extra needs (e.g., a high volume of bandwidth).
Conclusion
Large-scale apps are winning from using CloudFront since it helps to accelerate load times, reduce bandwidth consumption, secure the network, assure data availability. The service is a reliable option when you are searching for a top-notch content distribution network and are familiar with AWS services. That will undoubtedly turn out a convenient and full-fledged solution for better performance of your software applications.
