Cloudfront & AWS Global Accelerator

Question 1

What are some features of AWS cloudfront?

Answer 1

1. Stands for content delivery network (CDN)
2. Improves read performance, content is cached at the edge
3. Improves user experience
4. 216 point of presence globally (edge locations)
5. DDos protection (because worldwide) integration with shield, AWS web application firewall

Question 2

What are some features of cloudfront origins?

Answer 2

1. S3 bucket is an origin
   - For distributing files and caching them at the edge
   - Enchanced security with cloudfront origin access control
2. Custom origins (HTTP)
   - Application load balancer
   - EC2 instance

Question 3

What is the difference between cloudfront and S3 cross region replication?

Answer 3

Cloudfront:
- Global edge network
- Files are cached for a TTL (maybe a day)
- Great for static content that must be available everywhere (main benefit)

S3 Cross region replication:
- Must be setup for each region you want replication to happen
- File are updated in near real time
- read only
- Great for dynamic content that needs to be available at low-latency in a few regions (main benefit)

Question 4

What are some features of cloudfront geo restrictions?

Answer 4

1. You can restrict who can access your distribution
   - Allowlist: allow your users to access your content only if they’re in one of the countries on a list of approved countries

• Blocklist: Prevent your users from accessing your content if they’re in one of the countries on a list of banned countries

2. The “country” is determined using a 3rd party Geo-IP database

Question 5

What are the different cloudfront pricing?

Answer 5

The cost data of your per edge location price varies but they are:

1. Price class all: all regions best performance ( the world)
2. Price class 200: most regions, but excludes the most expensive regions
3. Price class 100: only the least expensive regions

Question 6

What are some features of cloudfront cache invalidations?

Answer 6

1. In case you debate the back end origin, cloudfront doesn’t know about it and will only get the refreshed content after the TTL has expired
2. However you can force an entire or partial cache refresh (thus bypassing the TTL) by performing a cloudfront invalidation
3. You can invalidate all files () or a special path (/images/)

Question 7

What is Unicast IP and anycast IP?

Answer 7

1. Unicast IP: one server hold one IP address
2. Anycast IP: all Server hold the same IP address and the client is routed to the nearest one

Question 8

Why are some things to keep in mind about AWS global accelerator?

Answer 8

1. Leverage the AWS internal network to route to your application
2. Had 2 anycast IP that is created for your application
3. The anycast IP send traffic directly to edge locations
4. The edge location send the traffic to your application

Question 9

What are some features of AWS global accelerator

Answer 9

1. Works with elastic IP, EC2 instances, ALB, NLB, public or private
2. Consistent performance
   - Intelligent routing to lowest latency and fast regional failover
   - No issue with client cache (bc the IP doesn’t change)
   - Internal AWS Network
3. Health checks
   - Global accelerator performs a health check of your application

• Helps make your application global (failover less than 1 minute for unhealthy)
• Great for disaster recovery (thanks to the health checks)

4. Security
   - Only 2 external IP need to be whitelisted
   - DDoS protection thanks to AWS shield

Question 10

What is the difference between WWS global accelerator and cloudfront?

Answer 10

• They both use AWS global network and its edge location around the world
• Both service integrate with AWS shield for DDoS protection

1. Cloudfront:
   - Improves performance for both catchable content (such as images and videos)
   - Dynamic content (such as API acceleration and dynamic site delivery)
   - Content is served at the edge
2. Global accelerator
   - Improve performance for a wide range of applications over TCP or UD
   - Proxying packets at the edge to applications running in one or more AWS regions
   - Good for HTTP use case that require static IP address
   - Good for HTTP use cases that require deterministic, fast regional failover