CloudFront is Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN) that reduces the latency for content delivery by physically serving the content closer to the customer. The content can be static web page content, videos, applications, APIs, or most recently, Lambda functions. CloudFront edge locations include the existing AWS regions, but are also in many other locations around the globe. The high-level operation of CloudFront is as follows:
- Users access your website for one or more objects
- DNS routes the request to the Amazon CloudFront edge location closest to the user's request
- The CloudFront edge location will either service the content via the cache or request the object from the origin
AWS CloudFront and CDN services in general are typically handled by application developers or DevOps engineers. However, it is always good to be aware of their operations.