Creating a CloudFront Distribution

Introduction

Amazon CloudFront is a fast Content Delivery Network (CDN) service. If you host a website in the us-east-1 (Virginia) region, users in Australia will experience high latency because data takes time to travel across the globe.

CloudFront solves this by caching your static assets (HTML, CSS, JS, Images) at Edge Locations globally. An Australian user downloads the files from a server in Sydney, drastically speeding up load times.

Origin Types

When you create a CloudFront Distribution, you must specify an Origin—the source of truth for your files. Common origins include:

1. Amazon S3 Bucket: The most common use case for hosting static React/Angular websites or media assets.
2. Elastic Load Balancer (ELB): Used when you are caching dynamic API responses generated by EC2 instances.

Creating a Distribution

Creating a distribution via the AWS Console is recommended due to the vast number of configuration options, but you can do it via the CLI.

First, you need an S3 bucket configured for website hosting.

Then, you create an Origin Access Control (OAC) to ensure users cannot bypass CloudFront to access S3 directly. Finally, you create the distribution:

aws cloudfront create-distribution \
    --origin-domain-name my-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com \
    --default-root-object index.html

Propagation

After creation, the status will show as Deploying. CloudFront is copying your configuration to over 400 Edge Locations worldwide. This process typically takes about 5 to 10 minutes. Once complete, you will be given a xxxx.cloudfront.net domain name to access your globally accelerated site!

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