Configure distributions

You create an Amazon CloudFront distribution to tell CloudFront from where you want content to be delivered, and the details about how to track and manage content delivery.

Choose from the following configuration settings:

  • Your content origin—The Amazon S3 bucket, AWS Elemental MediaPackage channel, AWS Elemental MediaStore container, Elastic Load Balancing load balancer, or HTTP server from which CloudFront gets the files to distribute. You can specify any combination of up to 25 origins for a single distribution.

  • Access—Whether you want access to the files to be available to everyone or restricted to some users.

  • Security—Whether you want to enable AWS WAF protection and require users to use HTTPS to access your content.

  • Cache key—Which values, if any, you want to include in the cache key. The cache key uniquely identifies each file in the cache for a given distribution.

  • Origin request settings—Whether you want CloudFront to include HTTP headers, cookies, or query strings in requests that it sends to your origin.

  • Geographic restrictions—Whether you want CloudFront to prevent users in selected countries from accessing your content.

  • Logs—Whether you want CloudFront to create standard logs or real-time logs that show viewer activity.

For more information, see Distribution settings reference.

For the current maximum number of distributions that you can create for each AWS account, see General quotas on distributions. There is no maximum number of files that you can serve per distribution.

You can use distributions to serve the following content over HTTP or HTTPS:

  • Static and dynamic download content, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files, using HTTP or HTTPS.

  • Video on demand in different formats, such as Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Microsoft Smooth Streaming. For more information, see Deliver video on demand with CloudFront.

  • A live event, such as a meeting, conference, or concert, in real time. For live streaming, you can create the distribution automatically by using an AWS CloudFormation stack. For more information, see Deliver live streaming video with CloudFront and AWS Media Services.

The following topics provide more details about CloudFront distributions and how to configure them to meet your business needs. For more information about creating a distribution, see Create a distribution.

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