CloudFront vs. Cloudflare: Making the Right CDN Choice for AWS Workloads
I recently published a deep-dive into CloudFront's architecture covering its internals, origin architecture, cache behavior, security, and edge compute capabilities. The most common follow-up question: should we use CloudFront or Cloudflare?
Amazon CloudFront: An Architecture Deep-Dive
Amazon CloudFront is one of the most underestimated services in the AWS portfolio. Most teams think of it as a caching layer you put in front of your S3 bucket or Application Load Balancer to speed up static asset delivery. That understanding was roughly correct in 2015. It is incomplete today. CloudFront has evolved into a globally distributed edge compute and security platform that handles request routing, WAF enforcement, DDoS mitigation, authentication, A/B testing, header manipulation, and serverless compute, all before a request ever reaches your origin. This article covers the architectural patterns and operational lessons I have accumulated from architecting systems that serve traffic through CloudFront across dozens of AWS accounts.