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CloudFront internals and DNS routing

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Hi,

I am currently learning CloudFront and would like to get some more insights on its internals.
Almost all materials mention that CloudFront uses edge locations around the world to give your content faster. But what does this actually mean and how it is doing that ?

My understanding is that you get a CloudFront DNS for your origin. When you issue a request, the dns server responds with the IP that is of the edge location closest to you, based internally on some IP geolocation service it uses. This part would conceptually be the same as setting up rules in Route53 to give you different IPs based on your location. Once you get your IP your request will eventually routed to the edge location IP, and then the remaining hops to reach your origin will be going through AWS routers. And on top of that you get caching plus if you set up your permissions properly, you should be hiding the IP of your actual server (let's say my origin is a ALB or EC2 instance), since the clients will always get cloudfront edge location IPs.

Is my understanding correct ?

  • VM
    a year ago

    Yes, your understanding is correct. DNS routes the request to the CloudFront POP, typically the nearest CloudFront POP in terms of latency—and routes the request to that edge location.

    CloudFront checks its cache for the requested object. If the object is in the cache, CloudFront returns it to the user. If the object is not in the cache, then it tries to reach the origin to fetch the content. More details are in the links shared below.

    Origin details are never revealed via CloudFront. Additionally, you can restrict access to the origin i.e. you can make sure that users can access the content only through the specified CloudFront distribution and prevents users from accessing the content directly.

Topics
Networking & Content Delivery
Tags
Amazon CloudFrontAmazon Route 53
Language
English
rePost-User-1387100
asked a year ago511 views
1 Answer
0

Amazon CloudFront is AWS’ content delivery network(CDN) that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds

You can read more about the Amazon CloudFront key features here: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/?whats-new-cloudfront.sort-by=item.additionalFields.postDateTime&whats-new-cloudfront.sort-order=desc#edge-locations

To deliver your content with CloudFront you would need to create CloudFront distributions, CloudFront distribution to tell CloudFront where you want content to be delivered from, and the details about how to track and manage content delivery. Distributions are unique CloudFront.net domain name to reference objects (abc123.cloudfront.net) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/GettingStarted.html

You can read more on how CloudFront delivers content to your users here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/HowCloudFrontWorks.html

AWS
VM
answered a year ago

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