Summary and Insights on Advanced CloudFront Options

This summary outlines key advanced options in AWS CloudFront that are significant for AWS Developer Engineers, especially in preparation for certification exams. We'll explore pricing, price classes, multiple origin setups, origin groups, and field-level encryption.

CloudFront Pricing and Price Classes

CloudFront's pricing varies by geographic location, affecting the cost-effectiveness of content delivery solutions:

• Pricing: Costs differ based on the edge location, with regions like the US, Canada, and Mexico being cheaper compared to places like India.
• Volume Discounts: Higher data transfers lead to reduced prices, e.g., transferring over five petabytes from the US can reduce the price to $0.02 per GB.

Price Classes:

• Price Class All: Includes all regions for best performance but at higher costs.
• Price Class 200: Offers most regions, excluding the most expensive ones.
• Price Class 100: Limits to the least expensive regions, primarily North America and Europe.

These classes help in managing costs by limiting the number of edge locations used in a CloudFront distribution.

Multiple Origins and Origin Groups

• Multiple Origins: Enables routing to different origins based on the content type or path. For example, API requests can be handled by an Application Load Balancer, while static content is served from S3 buckets.

• Origin Groups: Increases high availability and provides failover support. If the primary origin fails, CloudFront will attempt to serve content from a secondary origin. This setup is crucial for maintaining service availability even during partial outages.

Field-Level Encryption

• Purpose: Enhances security by encrypting sensitive information at the edge location before it is transmitted through the network.
• Mechanism: Uses asymmetric encryption, where sensitive fields (e.g., credit card information) are encrypted using a public key at the edge location. The encrypted data can only be decrypted by an entity with the corresponding private key at the web server.