When to use Amazon Cloudfront or S3

Question

Are there use cases that lend themselves better to Amazon cloudfront over s3 or the other way around? I\'m trying to understand the difference between the 2 through examples

Answer 1

Amazon S3 is a Simple Storage Service, this can be used large amount of information i.e. Videos, Images, PDF etc.

CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network, which is closer to the end user and is used to make the information available on Amazon S3 in the least possible time.

A sample use case is Video on Demand.

1. You stores your videos at one place. S3 stores all the pre-recorded videos in different formats.
2. You have global user case
3. CloudFront is used to cache the video to edge locations. This can be used to deliver content to the end user. Location is picked up automatically based on the closest physical edge location. Currently there are around 51 edge locations.

Some advantages of using CloudFront for right use case:

1. Improved Latency - Better end user experience.
2. Possible reduced data transfer cost. As the data is not every-time transferred from same S3 bucket in a particular AWS region.

Other possible use cases:

1. Live streaming
2. Gaming
3. Website Acceleration