AWS Launches CloudFront Edge Locations in Mumbai and Chennai

THIS IS HUGE!!! AWS finally has launched infrastructure in India. AWS today announced the launch of CloudFront edge locations in Mumbai and Chennai. This gives significant benefits to Indian customers and it also feels like a first step towards setting up bigger infrastructure in India. We are super excited!!

What is a CloudFront edge location anyways?

Content today is delivered mostly through Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Imagine you have a global ecommerce site with customers in USA, Europe and Asia. You decide to host your website somewhere in Asia. Thus your American and European customers will get subpar performance as their requests has to come all the way to Asia to get serviced. Similarly if you decide to host in USA, Asian customers will get subpar performance. CDN solves this issue by having a host of “Edge Locations” throughout the globe. These edge locations work as caching points, which cache your content and deliver locally to the customers, thus significantly reducing the latency and improving performance for customers. Also as content is delivered locally and in a distributed fashion, it is exponentially more scalable compared to delivering content from a single location. CloudFront is a CDN service from AWS which is  flexible and inexpensive (especially compared to the thousands of dollars that other CDN providers charge).

What is so great about having CloudFront edge locations in India?

So far Indian websites and applications that were using AWS had to use AWS infrastructure in Singapore (called Singapore Region). This essentially meant all the Indian users’ traffic was routed to Singapore and back. This induced undesirable latencies. With today’s announcement of edge locations in Mumbai and Singapore, AWS customers that uses CloudFront, will be able to take advantage of local edge locations and their customers will see significantly better performance. It will be a no-brainer for all the websites and applications targeted towards Indian customers to take advantage of this new development. If you are such website targeting Indian customers and not using CloudFront, this is your BIG reason to start using it. CloudFront also works with other provides so your can potentially keep using your hosting, and still use CloudFront.

Where can I know more about CDN and CloudFront?

You can know more about CloudFront at AWS website here. If you have further questions, feel free to post a comment below and I will answer it. We also have a AWS Certification Boot Camp – Level 3 course coming up which covers CloudFront in-depth. If you are interested to know more, please fill out this form.

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