Amazon CloudFront review
A full-featured CDN with strong AWS integration and plans from free to custom.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network for websites, applications, APIs, videos, and other web content. It caches content at 750 edge locations, supports custom HTTP origins, and delivers content over HTTPS and TLS. Its feature set covers signed URLs, signed cookies, geographic restrictions, Origin Shield, edge computing, request logging, continuous deployment, origin failover, and video-on-demand and live streaming workflows. It is best suited to AWS-centric teams that want a CDN closely connected to services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Lambda.
The published plans range from Free to Custom. Free costs $0 per distribution per month and includes a 1 million requests monthly allowance, a 100 GB data transfer monthly allowance, and serverless edge compute. Pro costs $15 per distribution per month with a 10 million requests monthly allowance, 50 TB data transfer monthly allowance, logging, and serverless edge compute. Business costs $200 per distribution per month and adds private origins within VPC and custom caching rules. Premium costs $1,000 per distribution per month and adds origin failover and an uptime SLA. Custom has custom pricing. The plan structure gives smaller deployments an entry point while scaling allowances and controls across paid tiers.
CloudFront stands out when delivery, compute, observability, media workflows, and origin resilience need to work within one AWS-oriented environment. CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge support programmable edge logic, while standard and real-time request logging connect with operational workflows. Video delivery integrates with AWS Elemental MediaConvert, MediaLive, MediaPackage, and MediaStore. Image optimization is supported through an architecture combining CloudFront, S3, and Lambda rather than a standalone CloudFront transformation feature. Teams seeking AWS service integration, edge controls, and streaming support should consider CloudFront; teams wanting a narrower CDN setup or less AWS-centered architecture may prefer an alternative.
Amazon CloudFront pros and cons
- Where it wins
- 750 edge locations with global content caching
- Edge compute through CloudFront Functions and Lambda@Edge
- Origin failover, streaming, logging, and AWS integrations
- Where it doesn't
- Advanced plans become costly at $200 and $1,000 monthly
- Image optimization uses an architecture combining CloudFront, S3, and Lambda
- The strongest ecosystem fit is centered on AWS services
Amazon CloudFront fact sheet, pricing and score →
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