THE AWS CERTIFIED ADVANCED NETWORKING – SPECIALTY EXAM OBJECTIVES COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER MAY INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE FOLLOWING:
Objective 1.1: Design a solution that incorporates edge network services to optimize user performance and traffic management for global architectures.
In this chapter, we will cover edge networking, APIs, and content distribution offerings that are specific to AWS. We will start at the beginning of the exam blueprint in Domain 1, which is about AWS network design. This chapter covers services offered at the edge of the global AWS network, including CloudFront, Global Accelerator, Load Balancing API Gateway, and the other edge offerings from AWS.
CloudFront is the AWS global content distribution network that is a pay-as-you-go service with minimum fees and no contracts that lock you into time-length windows.
CloudFront content is stored, or cached, at AWS edge locations. Edge locations are located throughout the world and contain large storage arrays to store the cached data. Edge locations also host AWS Lambda, DNS, API Gateway compression, and transfer acceleration endpoints.
AWS has more than 400 edge locations in more than 90 cities in 47 countries as of this writing. New edge locations are constantly being added as the network expands throughout the world. Figure 1.1 illustrates how these edge locations are spread throughout the world in major cities that do not have AWS regional data centers.
The base design for publishing content on the Internet is to host the data in either a cloud or private data center and have users access the information over the Internet from these centralized locations. While this design has been the standard for many years, there are several limitations. Users who are in geographically distant locations might have to contend with network round-trip latency and sometimes slow Internet links causing poor transfer speeds.
By using content distribution networks (CDNs), this data can be distributed over the AWS backbone network and cached at locations worldwide that are closer to the people and systems requesting the information. Now, using the same connection strings including the URLs, the data is served much closer to the destination and does not have to go back to the originating location to fetch the content. CloudFront is most effective when servicing frequently accessed content. This content can be either static or dynamic and can include web pages, images, software update files, and both audio and video media. Protocols supported include HTTP, HTTPS, PHP, and WebSockets as well as live or on-demand video streaming services running over HTTP.
FIGURE 1.1 AWS global CloudFront network
The originating, or origin, data can be stored in an AWS region or private data center, as shown in Figure 1.2. Static content can use storage systems such as an AWS S3 bucket, and dynamic content can use a web server running on EC2, for example. The origin is defined as the location where the source data is located.
FIGURE 1.2 AWS CloudFront edge distributions
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