CloudFront is Amazon's content delivery network (CDN) that can accelerate content delivery, improve performance and protect origins from traffic spikes. It has points of presence in over 100 locations globally. Lambda@Edge allows running Lambda functions at the edge of the CloudFront network to modify requests and responses. This allows things like dynamic content generation, authorization checks, A/B testing and more to occur closer to users for faster performance.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
@ric__harvey
rjh@amazon.com
Amazon CloudFront +
Lambda@Edge
Ric Harvey, Technical Developer Evangelist

2. Content Delivery Network

3. § Accelerate static and dynamic
§ Protect origin servers from load
§ Global Infrastructure
§ Highly Secure
§ Massively Scalable
§ Self Service
§ Priced to Minimize Cost
CloudFront: Global Content Delivery Network

4. Amazon CloudFront Global Content Delivery Network
113 PoPs (102 Edge Locations + 11 Regional Edge Caches)
Edge Locations
Multiple Edge Locations
Regional Caches

5. Customers across many industries
Social Media, Digital
Advertising, EdTech,
Finance
Enterprise
E-commerce
Media &
Entertainment
Gaming

6. Why are CDN’s important?

7. Bring your own……
Amazon Route 53 allows you to bring your own alias’s to
a Cloudfront distribution

8. AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) makes it easy to
provision, manage, deploy, and renew SSL/TLS
certificates on the AWS platform.
Bring your own……

9. Serverless

10. No servers to provision
or manage
Scales with usage
Never pay for idle Built-in availability
and fault tolerance
Serverless means …

11. How it works
Event source Services (anything)
Changes in data
state
Requests to
endpoints
Changes in
resource state
Function

12. …but what if you could run your Lambda functions
at multiple locations closer to the viewer?

13. Amazon CloudFrontAWS Lambda Lambda@Edge
Lambda@Edge

14. Globally
distributed
Scales with usage Never pay for idle Built-in availability
and fault tolerance
Bring your own code to the edge to improve user experience
Lambda@Edge
No servers to provision
or manage

15. Write once, run Lambda functions globally
N Virginia
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location

16. Lambda@Edge
Origin
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
AWS Location
Compute
Storage
Database

17. Lambda@Edge
Content-based routing
to any origin
Response generation
• Generate custom responses at the
edge
• Read and write access to headers,
query string, and cookies
Network calls
• Origin events
• Viewer events

18. Lambda vs Lambda@Edge
Lambda Lambda@Edge
Languages Node.js, Python, C#, Java Node.js
Memory 128->1536MB 128MB
Execution time <300 seconds <3 seconds (Origin-facing)
<1 seconds (Viewer-facing)
Deployment size <50MB <1MB
Request pricing First 1 million free
$0.20 per 1 million
$0.60 per 1 million
Duration
granularity
100ms 50ms
128MB for 100ms $0.000000208 $0.000000625

19. Use cases

20. Usecases – Response generation
Multiple origins
Personalisation (e.g. ‘Ric’s Account’ in the top-left)
Results of multiple API calls
Content-type transformation (e.g. XML->JSON)

21. Usecases – HTTP Redirects
Cool URIs don’t change (…though they may redirect)
Redirect to latest version
Redirect example.com -> www.example.com

22. Usecases – URL Rewriting
Semantic (pretty) URLs
/foo-cms/view/42.asp -> /articles/42
Adaptive content
Client capabilities – Accept-Type header, screen size
Image cropping/resizing

23. Usecases – Security Best Practices
Add security response headers:
• Strict-Transport-Security
• Content-Security-Policy
• X-Content-Type-Options
• X-Frame-Options
• X-XSS-Protection
• Referrer-Policy
• Public-Key-Pins
Remove informational response headers:
• Server
• Powered-By

24. Usecases –Authorization
Bot handling – using CAPTCHA
Non-standard authorization (not HTTP Basic/Digest/etc)
Origin doesn’t implement authorization
Pay-per-view / Paywall application

25. Usecases – A/B Testing
Test your theory on a proportion of users
Measure valuable metric (social likes/shares, engagement,
purchases, etc)
Implement findings

26. Usecases: Origin request, Origin selection
id user
1 alex
2 bob
3 joe
4 jane
User database
200 OK
Application
User Agent
POST /login
user=jane&pass=***
home-region
na
eu
ap
eu
Set-Cookie: home-region=eu

27. User Agent CloudFront distribution
www.example.com
North America
origin
User DB
Cache Behavior
/login
North America
app DB
hom
e-region=na ?
Europe origin Europe app DB
home-region=eu ?
APAC origin APAC app DB
home-region=ap ?
Cache Behavior
/app
Origin Request
Event
Set-Cookie
Usecases: Origin request, Origin selection

28. Summary

29. CloudFront
CDN’s are good!
• They protect origins from load
• Accelerate static and dynamic content (websites, APIs)
• Scalable and Global
• Cache content closer to the user
• Support HTTP/2 and IPv6

30. Summary Lambda@Edge
Features:
Header manipulation
URL rewrites
Response generation
Benefits:
Bring your own code
Familiar programming model
Write once, run everywhere

31. Ric Harvey, Technical Developer Evangelist
@ric__harvey
rjh@amazon.com