If you’d like to speed up the downloading of your content, you can use the Amazon CloudFront. CloudFront is a worldwide network of proxy servers that cache content locally. By leveraging the network’s cache, your content will be delivered faster than if the visitor were to access the site directly. Learn how to configure the CloudFront cache based on cookies, query strings, or time-to-live intervals.
Configure CloudFront to cache based on cookie values
If you’re using CloudFront to serve content, you might be wondering how to configure it to cache based on cookie values. Although cookies aren’t mandatory, it’s recommended. This will prevent CloudFront from caching requests with large numbers of unique values. To do this, configure your origin’s URL to be different than your CloudFront URL. You don’t have to use URLs with this feature, but it’s a good idea to use them to prevent users from caching your content.
To configure CloudFront to cache based on cookie values, go to the CloudFront service section in your AWS management panel. Select Custom-Managed-Cache-Policy. Make sure to enable all cookies and query strings. Then, click OK. When you’re finished, you can set up CloudFront to cache objects based on cookies or other header values. But before you can do this, you should remember that CloudFront can’t cache HTML pages.
Configure CloudFront to cache based on query strings
To configure CloudFront to cache based on query strings, you must first set the query string you want to use as the caching key. You can set it to either the full URL or the query string. In either case, CloudFront will cache the page that it receives as long as it matches the cache key. To test this, try calling a web service API and seeing if the response has a cached session ID. When the session ID is empty, the web site is not cached.
By default, CloudFront will forward all query string parameters to the origin server. But you can set CloudFront to only cache based on the query string if you want it to do that. Using this option will increase your site’s page load speed and require more resources from the origin server. The downside is that more traffic will result in higher costs. But if you want to maximize your page’s performance, then query string caching is a good solution.
Configure CloudFront to cache based on time-to-live intervals
When setting up your CDN, one of the main configuration aspects is the refresh interval. This interval is governed by the TTL, or time-to-live, parameter. When the file expires, CloudFront will request an updated version from its origin. The longer the interval, the longer the file will remain unavailable. It also doesn’t charge for data transfer.
To configure CloudFront to cache based on time to-live intervals, you must set the minimum TTL for objects. This minimum TTL helps serve frequently changing content. Setting the maximum expiration time for objects is important because it reduces the load on origins. The 304 status code is returned when an object expires. If an object expires before the specified period, CloudFront removes it. To manage the expiration time, you can configure Cache-Control max-age and s-max-age headers or configure individual objects by adding the Expires header field.
Using the regional edge caches can increase cache size and help with all types of content that tends to get less popular over time. The DNS route will then send requests to a CloudFront edge location. If the object is already present in the cache, CloudFront will return it immediately. If the object isn’t available in its cache, CloudFront will go to the closest regional edge cache and forward it to the POP.
Create a CloudFront distribution
To create a CloudFront distribution on Amazon, you’ll first need to create a CNAME record in your DNS system. This record will serve as the origin domain for requests to your CloudFront distribution. Each request made to your CloudFront distribution will be tracked in an access log. The access log shows details about every request, including the object requested, the date, the edge location serving the request, and the client’s IP address. In addition, the access logs for your CloudFront distribution also store the referrer, user agent, and other information about each request.
Once you’ve created the distribution, you can choose whether it serves HTTP or HTTPS. You can also choose to only serve HTTPS requests, or both HTTP and HTTPS requests. You can also edit or delete your CloudFront distribution by navigating to the Distributions tab. The basic CloudFront distribution can serve streaming media files over RMTP. You can also choose whether you want your CloudFront distribution to serve only HTTP or only HTTPS traffic.
