My 2 Years Experience with CloudFront
November 28, 2022
My 2 Years Experience with CloudFront
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon CloudFront
We use Amazon CloudFront to serve static media content like (images & videos) to users. We wanted a solution to serve static content without latency and AWS CloudFront addressed this problem. CloudFront also helps to deliver HLS videos to users. With CloudFront, we can sign the URL and server to users with this feature URL gets expired after a certain time and if someone embedded our content then it would be inaccessible. If you want to serve HLS videos then I suggest using signed cookies instead of signed URL. With signed cookies, we do not need to append an authentication token on each URL and it gets authenticated through cookies that pass on each network call.
- Serving HLS Videos with CloudFron Signed Cookies
- Serving Static content on the website
- Helps to hide your S3 bucket url in public
- Deliver files without any latency
- Easy to get usage statistics and logs
- Add settings to prevent access of any particular file type
- Integration of CloudFront Signed Cookies is difficult can provide better documentation
- Adding custom domain is tricky sometime because we have to create certificate first and region should be N. Virginia otherwise you will not see the certificate while attaching in CloudFront settings. I think there is need of improvement here.
- Setting CloudFront for different file type, I find difficulty when I was integrating it
- I guess CloudFront has all the features which any CDN should have. Only a better documentation is required. Currently it is really overwhelm.
- Serving static content like images
- Serve HLS videos with signed cookies
- Serve the content without any latency
- CloudFront offers monthly 1 TB free bandwidth so I suppose many companies not have to pay anything in their initial period
- After 1 TB, CloudFront could be costly (0.1 usd/GB), price could be different depending on the region but the speed we get with CLoudFront which makes totally worth it
CloudFronts beats everyone with their free 1 TB monthly bandwidth usage. And if we compare speed and latency of CloudFront with the BunnyCDN and CloudFare, CloudFront is was faster than them. With CloudFront, we get options like signed URL and signed cookies which prevent our content to embed on other websites plus setting file type which I don't find in their competitors.
Do you think Amazon CloudFront delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Amazon CloudFront's feature set?
Yes
Did Amazon CloudFront live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Amazon CloudFront go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Amazon CloudFront again?
Yes
Evaluating Amazon CloudFront and Competitors
Yes - We replace BunnyCDN with AWS CloudFront. The reason we replace it because Amazon CloudFront offers Free 1 TB monthly bandwidth which is more than enough for our organization plus I test the speed of CloudFront with the existing Bunny CDN and I found that Bunny CDN was very slow and users were facing an issue while accessing the content/
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
The single most important factor would be the price. With CloudFront our organization is saving 50 USD every month.
Pricing and Performance are tow most important factors for me to choose any product. With 1 TB free monthly bandwidth and performance like this, I will again choose CloudFront if I have to start again from scratch.