Amazon CloudFront Review
May 07, 2018
Amazon CloudFront Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a great CDN choice for applications that are already deployed to the Amazon/AWS stack. The value potential there is clear: first-party support with S3, EC2, etc. As a result, for customers that are already invested in the AWS ecosystem, using CloudFront is a logical choice. We use it across our own organization, and it fits into the CDN use case for most customers with AWS deployments. Like any CDN, CloudFront helps offload repetitive work from your main application logic, and, depending on how you configure it, can greatly speed up content downloads for end users.
- First-party integration with S3, EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, etc.
- Generous free tier for organizations that are just starting to work with CDNs
- Packaged into existing AWS ecosystem with consolidated billing, support, etc.
- Incredibly solid and reliable service
- If price is the main concern, CloudFront is not the cheapest-in-class by a wide margin
- Some of the settings are not obvious to new users, and the management dashboards could use work
- Lacks fine-grained access controls and statistical reports for usage
- Reduces the load of main application servers, meaning fewer active resources in use on EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, etc, saving money
- Greatly speeds up page loads for users, when configured correctly (like any CDN)
CloudFront is well-suited for a particular use case with its native tie-ins to other Amazon/AWS services, like S3. If choosing from a platform-specific CDN, we tend to go with whichever CDN is available for use on that platform (e.g. Google or Azure). In rare cases we might suggest a lower-cost CDN for use cases where the cost of bandwidth is of top importance, but these cases tend to be unusual.