Cloudfront Review

cloudfront review featured

Company Overview

Amazon, one of the largest e-commerce stores, also provides a suite of web services they call Amazon Web Services. Within this suite of services is their content delivery network called, Amazon Cloudfront. Amazon was originally founded back in 1994, however Cloudfront wasn’t Beta launched until 2008. Amazon web services provide an array of tools for web developers, network administrators, etc all within one dashboard. A few additional product categories they offer are:

  • Networking,
  • Analytics,
  • Database,
  • Security and Identity,
  • Application services, etc.

However, in this Cloudfront review, we’re going to focus specifically on their CDN. This will include discussing their current network of PoPs, the features they offer, and their pricing.

Network

Cloudfront currently holds 41 Points of Presence and 63 edge servers in total, with the majority of their edge servers being located in North America (US), EU, and Asia. The following table is a list of server locations that Cloudfront uses within these 3 continents.

US EU Asia
Ashburn x 3 Amsterdam x 2 Chennai
Atlanta x 2 Dublin Hong Kong x 2
Chicago Frankfurt x 5 Mumbai x 2
Dallas/Fort Worth x 2 London x 3 Manila
Hayward Madrid New Delhi
Jacksonville Marseille Osaka
Los Angeles x 2 Milan Seoul x 3
Miami Paris x 2 Singapore x 2
New York x 3 Stockholm Taipei
Newark Warsaw Tokyo x 2
Palo Alto
San Jose
Seattle
South Bend
St. Louis

Cloudfront also has 2 server locations in Canada (Montreal and Toronto), 2 locations in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney), and 2 locations in South America (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro).

Features

Amazon Cloudfront comes with an array of features. The table below outlines some of the most popular CDN features that are included with Cloudfront as well as a few that aren’t.

Feature Supported?
Origin Pull Yes
API Yes
ALPN Yes
Raw Logs Yes
Byte-range Requests Yes
Secure Token Yes
Gzip Yes
DDoS Protection Yes
HTTP/2 Yes
Shared SSL Yes
Origin Push Partially (Need to use S3)
Instant Purge Partially (Only invalidates assets)
Real-time Statistics Partially (Near real-time)
Custom SSL Yes (Extra cost)
Free Support No (Extra cost)
Origin Shield No
Let’s Encrypt SSL No

Cloudfront Pricing

Cloudfront’s pricing model is Pay as You Go. Therefore, there are no monthly commitments nor is there a minimum fee. They do have a free tier which provides users with 50GB of data transfer out and 2 million HTTP and HTTPS requests each month for one year. Once the one year mark is up, you will be required to start paying for the amount of traffic you use.

Amazon Cloudfront’s pricing is broken down into 3 different sections:

  1. Data transfer out to Internet
  2. Data transfer out to origin
  3. HTTP requests (per 10,000)

The following tables outline the pricing costs for each section.

The primary charge for using Amazon Cloudfront services is what they call Regional Data Transfer Out to Internet. This charge is in reference to the amount of bandwidth transferred from their edge servers to your visitors. The pricing here starts at $0.085 and fluctuates depending on both location and volume.

cloudfront data out to internet

The next portion of pricing is based on if data is transferred from the Cloudfront edge servers back to your origin server. This includes DELETE, OPTIONS, PATCH, POST, and PUT HTTP requests. Same as above, the cost fluctuates upon where the visitor is based, however, there is no volume pricing.

cloudfront data out to origin

Lastly, Cloudfront also charges based on how many HTTP requests are made. The following prices are based on a per 10,000 request basis. The cost also fluctuates depending upon visitor location as well as if the requests are made over HTTP vs HTTPS.

cloudfront http method pricing

Cloudfront Review – In Conclusion

Hopefully, this Cloudfront review has given you more insight into the features and pricing model of Amazon’s CDN service. Amazon is certainly a well known, respected, and reputable brand name. They provide an array of tools that are accessible all within a single dashboard which may prove to be more convenient for certain web developers.

Although their pricing model is Pay as You Go, be aware that they do charge in 3 separate ways: data out to Internet, data out to Origin, and HTTP requests. Bandwidth costs also do increase significantly depending upon where your visitors are coming from (e.g. South America is priced at $0.25 per GB). Therefore, when looking at Cloudfront as a CDN provider, it’s important to consider the global distribution of your current website visitors as well as your CDN budget.

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