Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

In this edition of the Amazon Onboarding series, we spotlight essential considerations for customers utilizing the Amazon CloudFront service at our site located at 6401 E HOWDY WELLS AVE LAS VEGAS NV 89115, known as “Amazon IXD – VGT2.” We will delve into achieving compliance, data protection, isolation of compute environments, API audits, and security access control. Each section will provide guidance, recommended reference architectures, and technical code to facilitate the approval process of Amazon CloudFront.

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) designed for high performance, security, and ease of use for developers. It offers businesses and web application developers an efficient, cost-effective solution for distributing content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like other AWS offerings, CloudFront operates on a self-service, pay-per-use model, requiring no long-term commitments or minimum fees.

CloudFront Architecture

The following diagram illustrates the CloudFront architecture:

1. Edge Location: When a user requests content served by CloudFront, the request is directed to the nearest edge location or point of presence (POP), ensuring optimal performance through low latency.
2. Regional Edge Caches (RECs): Situated between the origin server and the POPs, RECs have larger caches than individual POPs, keeping more content closer to users.
3. Lambda@Edge: This feature provides a fully programmable, serverless edge computing environment for implementing various customizations executed in RECs.
4. CloudFront Functions: A serverless scripting platform allowing you to run lightweight JavaScript code at CloudFront edge locations, at about one-sixth the cost of Lambda@Edge.

Utilizing Amazon CloudFront significantly reduces the volume of requests made to the application origin. Content is stored in CloudFront’s edge and regional caches and is only fetched from the origin when necessary. Further load reduction on application origins can be achieved by enabling Origin Shield, which creates a centralized caching layer, optimizing cache hit ratios, and condensing requests across regions, sometimes resulting in as few as one request per object. This traffic reduction increases the availability of applications.

Numerous customers in the financial services industry are currently taking advantage of Amazon CloudFront for their specific needs. For instance, Fintech Solutions adopted CloudFront for speedy content delivery on their websites and mobile applications, receiving positive feedback. Clients primarily access their portfolios via mobile devices; therefore, ensuring a consistent user experience across platforms was critical. The operations team now enjoys navigation speeds that are up to 40% faster on internal sites, significantly enhancing productivity and responsiveness to client requests.

Moreover, TechInsure integrates CloudFront with other AWS services to optimize speeds across the AWS Cloud, resulting in a substantial 30% month-over-month revenue increase as they draw in more customers thanks to the performance of their machine learning software running on AWS. Additionally, Finflux, a SaaS banking platform tailored for small and mid-sized banks, utilizes Amazon CloudFront to enhance page-loading times for their web application, supporting the processing of millions of transactions daily.

Achieving Compliance

AWS employs a shared responsibility model, encouraging customers to implement appropriate security controls for their cloud workloads to meet compliance requirements and maintain a robust security posture. Customers are responsible for the security of their content, applications, systems, and networks, while AWS ensures the security of the cloud itself, maintaining operational excellence and compliance with relevant legal and regulatory standards. To download third-party audit reports, customers can use AWS Artifact.

Amazon CloudFront is compliant with various security standards, including SOC 1, 2, 3, PCI, FedRAMP Moderate, HIPAA BAA, and more.

Data Protection

• Encryption at Rest: CloudFront automatically encrypts data at rest using encrypted SSDs for edge location POPs, and encrypted EBS volumes for RECs. The code and configurations for CloudFront Functions are also stored in an encrypted format.
• Encryption in Transit: For encrypting data in transit, an end-to-end HTTPS connection can be established from the client to CloudFront and then to the origin server. Customers must use their domain name and SSL/TLS certificate. This process can be managed through AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).

Moreover, CloudFront allows for field-level encryption to protect sensitive data, ensuring that only authorized applications can decrypt the information.

Restricting Access to Content

To manage content access for specific users, such as those who have paid a fee, CloudFront provides signed URLs or signed cookies. Geographical restrictions can also be set to allow or block access based on user locations.

Additionally, AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) can be utilized to create a web access control list to further restrict content access and protect against threats like cross-site scripting (XSS).

For more in-depth insights, check out this blog post on navigating work-life balance. Also, if you’re interested in meaningful volunteer work, refer to SHRM’s guide for expert advice. For a community discussion on starting your journey with Amazon, visit this Reddit thread which is an excellent resource.