Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) operated by Amazon Web Services. The content delivery network was created to provide a globally-distributed network of proxy servers to cache content, such as web videos or other bulky media, more locally to consumers, to improve access speed for downloading the content. CloudFront has servers located in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Australia, South America, Africa, and several major cities in the United States. In November 2022, the service operated from 400 edge locations on six continents. CloudFront operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. CloudFront competes with larger CDNs, such as Akamai, Azion, Cloudflare, and Edgio (previously known as Limelight Networks). Upon launch, Larry Dignan of ZDNet News stated that CloudFront could cause price and margin reductions for competing CDNs.

Timeline

Amazon CloudFront edge locations

In October 2018, Amazon CloudFront consisted of 138 access points (127 edge locations and 11 regional edge caches) in 63 cities across 29 countries.

Logs

CloudFront allows users to enable or disable logging. If enabled, the logs are stored on Amazon S3 buckets which can then be analyzed. These logs contain information like: These logs can be analyzed by using third-party tools such as S3Stat, Cloudlytics, Qloudstat, or AWStats.