Deploying a service behind a CDN

When we think of a CDN, it is typical to think that they are only useful for serving up static content. However, it is an AWS best practice to place CloudFront in front of all resources, even dynamic services, to improve security and performance. From a security perspective, CloudFront minimizes the attack surfaces and handles DDOS attacks at the edge to reduce the load on internal components. With regard to performance, CloudFront optimizes the pipe between the edge and availability zones, which improves performance even for POST and PUT operations. Furthermore, even a cache-control header of just a few seconds can have a significant impact on GET operations. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to add CloudFront in front of the AWS API Gateway.

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