Amazon CloudFront is a powerful tool that can vastly improve end-user experience of your videos and media.

How it works

Usually when someone views your video, their computer downloads it from the S3 server where you host your media.

Amazon S3 has six main servers, three in the US, one in Europe and the other two in Asia Pacific (Tokyo & Singapore). You choose between these when you upload your media.

If you enable Amazon CloudFront, your video is still stored on the main S3 server. But copies are created on a network of servers around the world, called a CDN (Content Delivery Network.) CloudFront is a CDN of Amazon S3. Each server in the network is called an edge server and each one will have a copy of your video.

Now when a viewer goes to watch your video, their computer will retrieve a copy from the nearest edge server.

As the data doesn't have to travel as far from server to viewer, it can be downloaded quicker.

Locations of Amazon S3 Edge servers

(your file will be delivered from the closest one to the customer):

United States: Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; 2 in New York, NY; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; San Jose, CA; Seattle, WA; South Bend, IN; St. Louis, MO

Europe: Amsterdam, Netherlands; Dublin, Ireland; Frankfurt, Germany; London, United Kingdom; Milan, Italy; Paris, France; Stockholm, Sweden

Asia: Hong Kong, China; Osaka, Japan; Tokyo, Japan; Singapore

South America: Sao Paulo, Brazil

What does it mean for me?

This means that you can achieve improved end user performance, including:

- reduced latency
- eliminate stalling
- quicker download speeds for Hi-Def or large videos
- increased reliability
- and increased availability

As with Amazon S3, you will only be charged for what you use. The difference in costs is minimal, but your audience will receive a better quality video and experience less waiting time.

Streaming or Progressive Download?

There are two types of CloudFront - both work on the same principle above but there are some differences.

Progressive download works in the same way as no CloudFront in that the whole video is delivered bit by bit from the server to the user - but it is delivered from the closest edge server.

A streaming CloudFront allows users to jump back and forth through the video as only the next bit to be watched is delivered and not the whole file.

To learn more on the difference between Streaming and Progressive Download and how to choose between the two, see this article.

A final note...

As the CloudFront network spans the globe, it takes time for the latest content on the main S3 server to propagate to the edge servers.

This can take up to 24 hours.

For this reason we advise against enabling daily content on CloudFront.

Click here to start using Amazon CloudFront.