Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is AWS's content delivery network, delivering content with low latency and high transfer speeds through more than 750 globally dispersed points of presence, using automated network mapping and intelligent routing. Its decisive commercial characteristic is not the network size but the billing: there are zero fees for data transfer out from AWS origins. For anything already hosted on AWS, that removes the egress charge which usually dominates the cost of serving content, and it is the reason CloudFront is frequently the default rather than a considered choice.

Security is included rather than sold separately at the base level. Traffic encryption, access controls and VPC origins are supported, and AWS Shield Standard defends against DDoS attacks at no additional charge. VPC origins are worth noting, since they allow an origin to stay private rather than being exposed publicly for the CDN to reach.

Edge programmability is available through serverless compute features, letting code run at the CDN edge to balance cost, performance and security. The named use cases show the breadth. Fast, secure websites use built-in data compression, edge compute and field-level encryption. Dynamic content and API delivery is supported with edge termination, gRPC and WebSockets, which matters because many CDNs handle static assets well and dynamic traffic poorly. Live and on-demand video integrates with AWS Media Services and AWS Elemental. Software, game patch and IoT over-the-air update distribution scales automatically at high transfer rates. Getting started material includes a guide, hands-on tutorial and Immersion Days training. Pricing has customisable options and consolidated request billing, though the pricing page was not directly retrievable here.