CloudFlare... I mean CloudFront

AWS' Content Distribution Solution

When I visit the CTO Advisor Hybrid Infrastructure hosted in a co-location (colo) provider here in Chicago, I walk past a contained room. My COLO salesperson insinuates it is the COLO space for AWS. Why would AWS have hosted hardware outside of AWS-owned data centers? One of many reasons is to support their CDN product CloudFront.

CloudFront is AWS’ answer to CDNs such as Cloudflare. Some interesting notes about CloudFront is that you can run both EC2 and AWS Lambda at the edge locations. This allows for data collection and processing closer to where the data is created. CDNs aren’t only about distributing data. CDNs collect and process data.