Amazon CloudFront Key Features

The Amazon CloudFront China Edge Network

To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront China uses a network of 4 Points Of Presence (POP) in 4 cities across China. CloudFront China currently has POPs in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhongwei, and Shenzhen, all of which are connected by the highly-resilient private backbone directly to Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD.

Edge locations: Beijing, Shanghai, Zhongwei, and Shenzhen.

Network optimizations for optimal performance
Amazon CloudFront runs on the Amazon Web Services global network backbone that allows for efficient transmission of requests between the CloudFront Edge locations and other Amazon Web Services services, across regions and applications. CloudFront China is isolated from the Amazon Web Services global network but each Edge location is connected by private network directly to Amazon Web Services (Beijing) Region operated by Sinnet and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region operated by NWCD. Network-layer optimizations such as TCP fast open, request collapsing, keep-alive connections, and more, enable the Amazon CDN to accelerate both static and dynamic content to improve user performance.

Dynamic or static content
Modern websites and applications are a rich mixture of dynamic, personalized and static content. Microservices also expose increasing numbers of APIs and requests between components. Amazon CloudFront is optimized for both, providing extensive flexibility for optimizing cache behavior, coupled with network-layer optimizations for latency and throughput. CloudFront supports the following HTTP methods: GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, and PATCH. This means you can improve the performance of dynamic websites that have web forms, comment and login boxes, “add to cart” buttons or other features that upload data from end users. It also means you can now use a single domain name to deliver your whole website through CloudFront thereby accelerating both the download and upload parts of your website.

Large libraries and media assets
Over time, cache retention in CloudFront has emerged as a key contributor to performance. The content delivery network is architected to keep objects longer in cache and to reduce cache churn. Techniques like tiered caching and de-duplication optimization of objects in cache help maximize cache retention. 

Protection against Network and Application Layer Attacks
CloudFront China and Amazon Shield Standard are co-resident at the Amazon Web Services edge and provide a scalable, reliable, and high-performance security perimeter for your applications and content. The Amazon CloudFront China network integrates seamlessly with Amazon Shield Standard to create a flexible, layered security perimeter against multiple types of attacks.

SSL/TLS Encryptions and HTTPS
With Amazon CloudFront China, you can deliver your content, APIs or applications via SSL/TLS, and advanced SSL features are enabled automatically through custom certificates you provide. Additionally, CloudFront provides a number of SSL optimizations and advanced capabilities such as full/half bridge HTTPS connections, OCSP stapling, Session Tickets, Perfect Forward Secrecy, TLS Protocol Enforcements and Field-Level Encryption, which further encrypts sensitive data in an HTTPS form using field-specific encryption keys (which you supply) before a POST request is forwarded to your origin.

Access Control
With Amazon CloudFront, you can restrict access to your content by using CloudFront’s geo-restriction capability, you can prevent users in specific geographic locations from accessing content that you're distributing through CloudFront. 

Full-featured APIs and DevOps Tools
Amazon CloudFront and CloudFront China provide developers with a full-featured API to create, configure and maintain your CloudFront distributions. In addition, developers have access to a number of tools such as Amazon SDKs to configure and deploy their workloads with Amazon CloudFront’s global network.

Edge behaviors
Your CloudFront Distribution can be configured with multiple behaviors which govern how CloudFront will process your request and what features will be applied. Use different behaviors that you configure to take control of how CloudFront caches, how CloudFront communicates with your origin, to customize the headers and metadata that are forwarded to your origin, create content variants with flexible cache-key manipulation, support for various compression modes, and make other customizations. With built-in device detection, CloudFront can detect the device type (desktop, tablet, Smart TV, or mobile device) and pass that information to your application by adding new HTTP headers, to let you easily adapt the content returned or other responses. 

Pay-as-you-go publicly available pricing and discounted pricing
With Amazon CloudFront pay-as-you-go pricing, you pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. For customers who are willing to make certain minimum traffic commitments, we also offer discounted pricing. Learn more about Amazon CloudFront pricing.

Free Data Transfer between Amazon Web Services cloud services and Amazon CloudFront
If you use Amazon Web Services China origins such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, or Elastic Load Balancing, you don’t pay for any data transferred between these services and CloudFront China.

For CloudFront distributions with international orgins, customers are subject to the data transfer fees standard to those origins. Learn more. >>

To learn more about all Amazon CloudFront features and how to configure them, please refer to the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Interested in signing up for discounted pricing? Please contact us.