CloudFront
A content delivery network that caches your site at edge locations worldwide, so the first byte comes from somewhere near the reader rather than from your origin.
What it is
CloudFront is AWS's CDN. You point a distribution at an origin — commonly an S3 bucket or a load balancer — and CloudFront serves copies from hundreds of edge locations, so a reader in Nairobi is not waiting on a round trip to Ireland.
It is also where TLS, custom domains, and edge-level redirects usually live for a static site, which is why "S3 for storage, CloudFront in front" is the standard pairing rather than an optimisation you add later.
Core concepts
- Distribution — the CDN configuration itself: origins, behaviours, and the domain readers actually hit.
- Origin — where CloudFront fetches when it has no cached copy. An S3 bucket is the common case.
- Cache behaviour — path-pattern rules deciding what gets cached, for how long, and what gets forwarded to the origin.
- Invalidation — explicitly evicting cached objects after a deploy, because a CDN that never forgets is a CDN that serves last week's site.
Combines with
Build it, graded
CloudFront is explained here, but no CloudSynth concept teaches it yet. When one does, this section fills in automatically — nothing about this page is hand-maintained.