Written By Jesse Muraya
Benefits and Use Cases
Amazon Web Services (AWS)’ Content delivery network service Amazon CloudFront has expanded its footprint into Kenya with the launch of a new Edge location in Nairobi. This joins other countries in the continent like South Africa (SA) bringing a greater presence to the African continent.
The Edge location in Kenya reduces wait time for end users when they visit websites, stream videos, play online games, download applications, etc.
Amazon’s CloudFront service accelerates content delivery for users worldwide, encouraging low latency and higher transfer speeds. With these new locations, CloudFront now has 216 Points of Presence in 84 cities across 42 countries.
The locations offer the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon Cloudfront such as Lambda@Edge, Field Level Encryption and Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration, as well as integration with other AWS services.
Uses Cases
Accelerate Static Website content delivery
Static content is any content that can be delivered to an end user without having to be generated, modified, or processed
CloudFront can speed up the delivery of your static content (e.g. Images, Style sheets, JavaScript, etc.) to viewers across the globe. By using CloudFront, you can take advantage of the AWS backbone network and CloudFront edge servers to give your viewers a fast, safe, and reliable experience when they visit your website.
Serve Video on Demand or live streaming video
CloudFront offers several options for streaming your media to global viewers – both pre-recorded files and live events.
- For Video on Demand (VOD) streaming, you can use CloudFront to stream in common formats such as MPEG DASH, Apple HLS, Microsoft Smooth Streaming and CMAF, to any device
- For broadcasting a live stream, you can cache media fragments at the edge, so that multiple requests for the manifest file that delivers the fragments in the right order can be combined to reduce the load on your original server
For more use cases on Amazon’s CloudFront click HERE
In a nutshell, for whatever workloads you have, if you want to reduce latency and improve website performance, Amazons CloudFront will do the job.
Contact us to find out more on how to improve your websites performance using Amazon’s CloudFront Edge location: