CloudFront Distributions

Overview

Amazon CloudFront is a content distribution network for delivering static content stored in your S3 buckets. Distributions provide an efficient way of delivering key content to end users all over the world by using a global network of "edge locations." An edge location is a geographical site where CloudFront caches copies of commonly downloaded objects such as web pages, images, media files, etc. Your S3 bucket (origin server) contains the master copy of an object. When a user requests one of the objects in your distribution, CloudFront determines which edge location is best able to serve the request in order to ensure optimal download performance for the end user. If a copy of the object does not already exist at the edge location, CloudFront will grab a copy of the object and place it at the appropriate edge location, where it will remain cached for 1 hour (default). Each AWS account can have up to 100 distributions.

Before you can use Amazon CloudFront distributions, you must first sign-up for the service.

This page displays the following CloudFront information:

• Nickname - A user specified nickname for the CF distribution
• Identification (ID) - Unique identifier that is autogenerated by AWS during the creation process and assigned to the distribution (e.g. E2Q0AOE2Q0AOL)
• Type - The type of CF distribution (basic or streaming)
• Origin Type - The type of storage that will be used as the origin server, which stores master copies of the assets that will be served by CloudFront. (e.g. S3 or custom)
• DNS Name - The DNS name of the origin server. (e.g. For S3, it would be 'mybucket.s3.amazonaws.com')
• S3 Bucket - Name of the S3 bucket that will serve as the "origin server" for your distribution. It will contain the master copies of your objects. (e.g. mybucket)
• Domain - The CloudFront domain name you need to use when linking to your objects. (e.g. d60472d6047qy9.mysite.com). You will use the domain name to construct a link to an object. (e.g. http://<domain>/image.jpg or http://d60472d6047qy9.mysite.com>/image.jpg)</domain>
• Origin Access Identity - The virtual identity that will be used to give your CF distribution permission to fetch a private object from your origin server (S3 bucket). Use the OAI to configure the distribution so that end users can only access objects in an Amazon S3 bucket (origin server) through a CloudFront distribution.
• Last modified - Date and timestamp of when the distribution was last modified.
• Logging - If enabled, you must define an S3 bucket and a path prefix to store access logs. With logging enabled for your distribution, gzipped access logs are stored in a 'logging' folder of your S3 bucket.
• Status - Current status of the distribution.
  • Deployed (ready to use) or InProgress (created or updated, but not quite ready for use)
• Enabled - A distribution can only serve content if the distribution is enabled. It takes up to 15 minutes to disable a distribution. When you disable a distribution, it will be taken offline; CloudFront will no longer accept end user requests for content from the distribution.
• Https only - If selected, only HTTPS requests are permitted. If not selected, both HTTP and HTTPS requests are permitted.
• Actions - Edit or Delete the CloudFront distribution.

Action Buttons

• New Basic Distribution - Create a new basic CloudFront distribution for serving primarily static content over standard HTTP/HTTPS protocol.
• New Streaming Distribution - Create a new streaming CloudFront distribution for streaming primarily on-demand media files over RMTP.

Actions

Concepts

See also

• Sign up for AWS CloudFront
• AWS CloudFront pricing

Related FAQs