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

One aspect missed here is:

Amazon Cloudfront also offers lower prices than Amazon S3 at higher usage tiers.

• Cloudfront CDN is for distribution of content across multiple servers geographically distributed (CSS, JS)

• Whereas s3 is more of a per user less used resources store (user images, PDFs).

You can serve your Cloudfront resources from an s3 bucket completely bypassing your web server.

(Useful in situations where your web server pre-compiles and stores images and java-script. storing them on s3 means your server memory footprint is reduced )

Ex: On Heroku Slugs (complied application sizes can be reduced by using s3 and wrapping it with cloud-front CDN will improve throughput)