Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a globally distributed and highly scalable Content Delivery Network (CDN) service offered by Amazon online Services (AWS) that improves the performance, security, and availability of online applications, APIs, and media content. The platform provides low latency and high transfer speeds by leveraging AWS' huge global network backbone and a dense global footprint of over 700 Points of Presence (PoPs) and regional edge caches. When a user requests content, CloudFront intelligently redirects the request to the nearest edge point, providing the data from a cache and significantly minimizing the distance it must travel.

Beyond static asset caching (images, CSS, JavaScript), CloudFront is designed for dynamic content acceleration and API delivery. It leverages network-layer optimizations such as TCP fast open and keep-alive connections to speed up material that cannot be cached, providing peak performance for modern, dynamic websites and microservices. CloudFront provides developers with powerful Edge Programmability via CloudFront Functions (lightweight JavaScript for sub-millisecond tasks like header manipulation) and Lambda@Edge (richer compute for tasks like authentication or server-side rendering), allowing code execution closer to the user and reducing origin load and latency.