Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a vast array of services to help businesses grow, improve performance, and keep their data secure. Two especially noteworthy services are Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator, which are designed to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performance applications. In relation to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam, understanding these services is essential.
Amazon CloudFront
CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service. It brings together complex processing tasks, storage, and delivery requirements into a simple, easy-to-use service.
High-Level Benefits of CloudFront include:
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Performance:
CloudFront delivers your content through a worldwide network of data centers known as edge locations. Whenever a user requests content that’s being served via CloudFront, they’re routed to the closest edge location, thus reducing latency and providing the best possible performance.
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Scale:
CloudFront has the ability to handle everything from small to massive workloads without any impact on performance. Users don’t have to estimate traffic and capacity; CloudFront scales automatically.
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Security:
CloudFront provides numerous security features, including HTTPS support for encrypted data transfer, and integration with AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall, and Route 53 to help protect your applications from malicious activity.
AWS Global Accelerator
The AWS Global Accelerator, on the other hand, is a service that delivers instant and static IP addresses that route your user traffic through Amazon’s sophisticated global network infrastructure, improving the performance of your internet applications.
High-Level Benefits of AWS Global Accelerator include:
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Performance:
Similar to CloudFront, Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network backbone and edge locations. However, it focuses on improving long-distance network performance, which is beneficial for applications that need to transfer data across geographical boundaries quickly.
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Availability and reliability:
By leveraging the extensive infrastructure of AWS, Global Accelerator improves the availability of your applications by monitoring the health of your application’s endpoints and rerouting traffic to healthy endpoints in less than a minute.
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Simplicity:
By providing fixed entry points (static anycast IP addresses) to your applications, AWS Global Accelerator simplifies the management of your global application deployment.
Comparison between CloudFront and Global Accelerator
While both CloudFront and Global Accelerator can help improve application performance, they’re designed for slightly different use cases.
- CloudFront is designed for serving static and dynamic content over HTTP/S (websites, APIs, media files, etc.), whereas Global Accelerator is designed for non-HTTP use cases such as Voice over IP (VoIP), gaming, and IoT applications, as well as HTTP/S-based applications that require persistent IP addresses.
- Global Accelerator does not cache content, while CloudFront does. Therefore, for content that changes regularly, Global Accelerator could be a better choice, and for static content, CloudFront could be more useful.
Understanding these high-level benefits and differences between Amazon CloudFront and AWS Global Accelerator is key to determining which service to utilize for your distinctive application requirements, and when preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam.
Practice Test
True or False: Edge locations help to minimize the latency in delivering content and speed up the distribution of content to end-user locations.
- True
- False
Answer: True.
Explanation: Edge locations are essentially data centers that cache web content closer to users, therefore helps to reduce latency and speed up the distribution.
True or False: AWS Global Accelerator enhances your application performance only within one continent.
- True
- False
Answer: False.
Explanation: AWS Global Accelerator is designed to improve performance over the AWS network for your applications that are distributed and have end-users across multiple geographies.
With AWS edge locations, you can deliver content to your users with lower latency and high data transfer speeds. Which of the following services does this statement describe?
- a) AWS Management Console
- b) Amazon CloudFront
- c) Amazon S3
- d) Amazon EC2
Answer: b) Amazon CloudFront.
Explanation: Amazon CloudFront uses edge locations to cache and deliver content to users with low latency and high speeds.
Which of the following is NOT a benefit of using edge locations?
- a) Lower latency
- b) High data transfer speeds
- c) High costs
- d) Global content distribution
Answer: c) High costs.
Explanation: Edge locations actually help reduce costs by minimizing data transfer distance and therefore costs.
Multiple Select: Which AWS services use edge locations?
- a) Amazon CloudFront
- b) Amazon Route53
- c) AWS Global Accelerator
- d) AWS Management Console
Answer: a) Amazon CloudFront, b) Amazon Route53, c) AWS Global Accelerator.
Explanation: CloudFront, Route53, and the Global Accelerator are services associated with AWS edge locations for caching and delivery purposes. AWS Management Console doesn’t use edge locations.
True or False: By providing content replication, AWS Edge Locations can help improve the security of your application.
- True
- False
Answer: True.
Explanation: Edge Locations do help improve security by providing DDoS mitigation and by distributing user traffic to minimize potential impact.
Which AWS service would you use to distribute your dynamic, static, streaming, or interactive content worldwide?
- a) AWS Kinesis
- b) Amazon EC2
- c) Amazon CloudFront
- d) Amazon S3
Answer: c) Amazon CloudFront.
Explanation: Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that works with edge locations to distribute content worldwide.
True or False: CloudFront does not provide benefits in terms of performance and uptime of your web application.
- True
- False
Answer: False.
Explanation: CloudFront improves the performance by serving your content from edge locations and provides more uptime by replicating content across multiple regions.
Edge Locations are primarily used to cache ____.
- a) User information
- b) Web content
- c) Application algorithms
- d) Network protocols
Answer: b) Web content.
Explanation: Edge Locations are mainly used to cache web content closer to the users, reducing the latency.
AWS CloudFront supports the delivery of which type of content?
- a) Music files
- b) JavaScript files
- c) Both Music and JavaScript files & more
- d) None of the above
Answer: c) Both Music and JavaScript files & more.
Explanation: CloudFront is a CDN service provided by AWS that accelerates the distribution of static and dynamic web content such as .html, .css, .js, and image files, to users.
Interview Questions
What is an edge location in AWS?
An edge location in AWS is a site that AWS uses to cache data to give users faster access anywhere in the world. They are spread across most of the major cities around the globe.
How does Amazon CloudFront work with edge locations?
Amazon CloudFront employs a global network of edge locations, each storing a copy of your content. When a user requests content, CloudFront serves it from the edge location that can deliver the highest performance, ensuring the content is delivered with the quickest possible latency.
What are the benefits of using AWS Global Accelerator?
AWS Global Accelerator improves the availability and performance of your applications for local and global users. It uses the AWS global network to direct internet traffic from your users to your applications on AWS, helping improve the performance for your users.
What impact do edge locations have on latency?
Edge locations help to reduce latency by storing copies of data closer to end users. This eliminates the need for every single request to travel a great distance to reach a host server, thereby reducing the latency of data delivery.
How does Amazon CloudFront help improve security?
Amazon CloudFront provides a number of security benefits such as DDoS protection, data encryption, and integration with AWS Shield, AWS Web Application Firewall, and Route 53 to help protect your applications.
How many edge locations are currently present worldwide by AWS?
Currently, AWS has more than 200 edge locations spread across the globe.
What services work in conjunction with edge locations for content delivery?
Services like Amazon CloudFront, AWS Lambda@Edge, and Amazon Route 53 work in conjunction with edge locations for content delivery.
How do edge locations affect costs?
By reducing latency and the data amount traveling back to the origin, edge locations can help decrease the AWS data transfer costs.
How does AWS Global Accelerator’s route selection work?
AWS Global Accelerator directs user traffic to the optimal AWS edge location, which is determined based on the health checks of the application endpoints and the geographic location of the user.
What happens if an edge location fails?
If an edge location fails or becomes unavailable, the AWS system is designed to route users to the next best available location, ensuring continuous service availability.
What does Amazon CloudFront integrate with?
Amazon CloudFront integrates seamlessly with services including AWS Shield for DDoS mitigation, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing or Amazon EC2 as origins for your applications, Lambda@Edge for advanced features, and much more.
How does AWS Lambda@Edge work with Edge Locations?
Lambda@Edge lets you run Lambda functions at AWS Edge Locations, allowing you to deliver full-featured content to your users with reduced latency.
Can you manually select an edge location?
No, edge locations are automatically selected based on data usage patterns and network conditions.
How does CloudFront handle dynamic content?
Amazon CloudFront supports all files including dynamic as well as static. Content is refreshed from the origin servers according to the Time-to-Live (TTL) period set on the files.
Is there a limit to the data stored in an edge location?
No, there’s no limit to the amount of data that can be stored in an edge location. However, the data stored is determined by the request volume and the specific edge location’s capacity.
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