Amazon CloudFront Review - Details, Pros and Cons

Amazon CloudFront is a web service that is used for content delivery. It is integration with AWS (Amazon Web Services) which gives businesses and users to easily distribute content to ender users at high speeds without any latency.

The CDN from Amazon made its first appearance in 2008 as a beta. It now uses 79 edge locations across 49 countries. Its global network covers Europe, Asia, North America, Australia and also South America.

You can speed up the delivery of your files and content over an HTTP/HTTPS server using CloudFront. You also get integrated support for on-demand streaming through RTMP.

Read on to know more about Amazon CloudFront review in details below.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Free tier for a year.

Highly configurable.

Reasonable cost.

Bunch of advanced features.

Cons

It will cost extra for tech support.

Not easy to calculate the monthly expenditure.

Some of the other CDNs offer better performance.

Initial Setup

It’s not difficult to sign up for Amazon CloudFront. Because you get the free trial for a year, it means you don’t need to fill out any payment information. All you need to provide is your email address, name, a password, accept the basic plan and you’re done.

Initially, you won’t have clue about what you should next on the AWS console. Search for CloudFront, to create a new web-based/RTMP Distribution.

Due to more than 30 options in the Create Distribution web from, the setup becomes a little complicated. After selecting one, you need to enter your domain name in the Original Domain Name box, hit the Enter key and you’re done creating a CloudFront Distribution.

When the creating distribution completes, usually takes a couple of minutes, you can locate the CloudFront domain name by looking at “d3vwin5gov9p15.cloudfront.net”.

Performance

Back in July 2017 CDNPerf, CloudFront secured tenth place out of 24, with a query speed of 57ms. Amazon CloudFront results was reasonable compared to CDN77, Fastly and MaxCDN.

In Africa, CloudFront secured 16^th position, 8^th in South America and 2^nd in India to Bitgravity, a Tata Communication’s product. For uptime, CloudFront secured 2^nd place scoring 99.89% in real-user monitoring. But still, Amazon CloudFront will be there when you need it.

Features

Amazon CloudFront CDN is not only cost-effective but also has a lot to offer. Since it’s built on a reliable infrastructure, you can expect amazing speeds and adaptability to most of your website’s current needs.

CloudFront is integrated to other AWS (Amazon Web Services), it offers simple functionality, can distribute websites, other web applications and much more. Below are some of Amazon CloudFront’s key features:

CloudFront users multi-tiered approach. Your contents may be held on 11 additional regional edge cache.

If at the close edge location, your content isn’t cached, it checks for regional cache.

CloudFront also maintains an unbroken connection with your origin servers. In case the above two features doesn’t work out, it uses the additional network optimisations to improve response time and speed.

You get access to all the usual AWS features because of CloudFront’s deep integration with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

You have the ability to transfer or send data between other AWS services and CloudFront, at no additional costs.

With the help of AWS Certificate Manager, you can create and deploy as many custom SSL certificates at no additional costs.

AWS Web Application offers built-in Firewall protection. It helps to defend against common exploits. AWS also defends you against DDoS attacks, and you can manage everything through the usual AWS console.

Pricing

If you’re new to CDNs or is not sure about Amazon CloudFront, then, there is no need to worry, because Amazon comes with a one-year free tier. All the news customers to AWS gets 50GB of traffic, each month for a year.

For testing out CloudFront and understand what is a CDN and about CloudFront, free tier for a year is good news. But once the free tier period is over, which is one year, you need to pay according to your usage.

The pricing may vary depending on locations. The starting price for US and Europe is $0.085 and $0.25 in South America. I would recommend you not to go for expensive locations if you’re on a tight budget.

You’ll also be charged for request, also the pricing varies depending on whether it’s HTTPS or HTTP. But expect to be charged, starting, $0.0075 per 10K requests.

Overall, Amazon CloudFront has better than average offering, in contrast to what you’re getting from it. But compared to KeyCDN or MaxCDN, CloudFront is on the higher side.

Final Thoughts

I hope after going through the Amazon CloudFront review, you would be able to decide whether to go or not go for it. In short, CloudFront can easily be set up in minutes, it’s highly configurable and has a wide global network.

Though, the pricing is complex and speed isn’t the best, because of the free tier, it’s still worth a try.

Also Read: Microsoft 365 Reviews and Pricing 2021