Most frequently asked Cloudfront Interview Questions

What is Amazon CloudFront?
What are the benefits of AWS CloudFront?
What are the features of CloudFront?
What are the Uses AWS CloudFront?
Is Digital Rights Management in built as part of cloudfront ?
When to use Amazon Cloudfront?
Can a Single web server be used to implement CDN at amazon?
How to use browser caching with Amazon S3?
How can we disable Cache for CloudFront?
How can I update files on Amazon's CDN?

What is Amazon CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is used as a global content delivery network services, as it retrieves data from Amazon S3 bucket and then distributes it to multiple datacenter locations.CloudFront delivers data, videos, applications and APIs to the viewers with low latency and high transfer rates.
Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network which offers the service at a very low cost as the user has to pay only as it is known as pay-as-you-go pricing model.

What are the benefits of AWS CloudFront?

Security to the Content - It is a highlt content dilevery network which has each network and application level protection.It defends our applications from a lot of refined threats and DDoS attacks.
Integrating Network - This construct on the increasing international AWS infrastructure.It helps the applications by delivering availability, scalibility and performance for everyone.
Great Performance - It directly connects with many end users ISPs and the AWS backbone network to accelerate the delivery of the content end to end.
Economical - By this the users pays just for the information transfer and requests accustomated delivery content to the customers.

What are the features of CloudFront?

Fast
Simple
Cost-effective
Elastic
Reliable
Global

What are the Uses AWS CloudFront?

Static Quality Caching helps in speding up the process of delivery of the content.
Live and On-Demand Video Streaming helps in streaming the media with Amazon CloudFront.
Security and DDoS Protection defends the layer of DDoS mitigation and also AWS WAF for seven layers protection.
Dynamic and Customized Content improves the performance, responsibility, and updates dynamic parts of the application.
API Acceleration accelerates the API calls.
Software Distribution is globally distributes and transfer software updats.

Is Digital Rights Management in built as part of cloudfront ?

No, DRM is not built in by default in CloudFront as CloudFront is a CDN that securely support should not be enabled.We can use multiple Drm solutions in the combination with CloudFront for content protection.

When to use Amazon Cloudfront?

CloudFront is a CDN that proxies and caches web data at edge locations as close to users as possible.This data is served by CloudFront that may or may not come from S3, as it is more optimized for delivery speed and the bandwidth costs more. If tht user is localized we cant see too much difference working with S3 or CloudFront.

Can a Single web server be used to implement CDN at amazon?

Yes we can use a single web server for implementing CDN at amazon as we do not mandate use of minimum use of the origin in terms of numbers of EC2 instances.

How to use browser caching with Amazon S3?

We can browse caching by using the following code:


Leverage browser caching    
E (55)
52%
Server  High
What does this mean?
The following cacheable resources have a short freshness lifetime. Specify an expiration at least one week in the future for the following resources:

http://mysite.s3.amazonaws.com/profile.png (expiration not specified)
http://mysite.s3.amazonaws.com/circle.player.css (expiration not specified)
http://mysite.s3.amazonaws.com/main.js (expiration not specified)
http://mysite.s3.amazonaws.com/not.the.skin.css (expiration not specified)
http://cdn-images.mailchimp.com/embedcode/slim-321711.css (expiration not specified)

How can we disable Cache for CloudFront?

We can disable cache for cloudfront by inputing the value for :
Minimum TTL - helps in specifying the minimum amount of time we want the objects to stay in CloudFront caches before cloudfront sends another request to our origin for determining if the object is updated.
Maximum TTL - helps in specifying the maximum time we want the objects to stay in CloudFront caches before cloudfront sends another request to our origin for determining if the object is updated.
Default TTL - helps in specifying the default time we want the objects to stay in CloudFront caches before cloudfront sends another request to our origin for determining if the object is updated.

How can I update files on Amazon's CDN?

POST /2010-08-01/distribution/[distribution ID]/invalidation HTTP/1.0
Host: cloudfront.amazonaws.com
Authorization: [AWS authentication string]
Content-Type: text/xml

<InvalidationBatch>
   <Path>/image1.jpg</Path>
  <Path>/image2.jpg</Path>
   <Path>/videos/movie.flv</Path>
   <CallerReference>my-batch</CallerReference>
</InvalidationBatch>