In this webinar, we'll provide an overview on how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your whole site. We’ll demonstrate how you can use Amazon CloudFront to help architect your site to deliver both static and dynamic content (portions of your site that change for each end-user). We’ll also walk through how you can configure multiple origin servers for your Amazon CloudFront distribution providing you the flexibility to keep your content in different origin locations without the need to create multiple distributions or manage multiple domain names on your website.. We also show you how you can use query string parameters to help customize your web pages for each viewer and how you can configure multiple cache behaviors for your download distribution based on URL patterns on your website. The content for this webinar will be similar to what the CloudFront team presented at the recent AWS Summits in NY and SF.

1. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
Whole Site Delivery with
Amazon CloudFront
Nihar Bihani, Senior Product Manager - Amazon CloudFront
Stephen Evans – Head of Digital Technology, Toronto Star
Irakli Nadareishvili - Director of Engineering, Digital Media, NPR
1

2. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
Agenda
What is Whole Site Delivery?
Why use CloudFront for Whole Site Delivery?
Demo
Customer Stories:
• Stephen Evans, Toronto Star Newspapers
• Irakli Nadareishvili, National Public Radio

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What is Whole Site Delivery?

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Dynamic
Static
Personalized Website Example

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Typical Website Architecture
Elastic Load
Balancing
Dynamic Content
Amazon EC2
Static Content
Amazon S3
cdn.example.com/*.jpg
www.example.com/*.php
Custom Origin
OR
OR
Custom Origin

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Whole Site Delivery with CloudFront
Elastic Load
Balancing
Dynamic Content
Amazon EC2
Static Content
Amazon S3 Custom Origin
OR
OR
Custom Origin
Amazon CloudFront
www.example.com
*.jpg
*.php

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Whole Site Delivery: Common Myths
Myths…
None of my HTML pages are cacheable.
My HTML pages are customized so those
cannot be cached.
My pages are personalized and unique
for each user, so a CDN won’t be useful.
Debunked…
Often, many pages are cacheable – e.g.
search results pages.
Use Cookies and Query Strings as cache
keys – e.g. local weather pages.
Network and path optimizations allow
CloudFront to speed up dynamic content
– e.g. personalized pages.

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Whole Site Delivery Use Cases
• News
• Weather
• Sports
• Social Media
• Advertising
• Travel
• Stocks

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Why use CloudFront for Whole Site Delivery?

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Benefits of Whole Site Delivery with Amazon CloudFront
Making your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less
…by leveraging AWS’ presence at the edge of the Internet.

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CloudFront can make your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less

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Faster: The Performance Problem
Long Distance + Poor Network = Slow Load Times

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Faster: How CloudFront Helps
CloudFront helps change this equation to…
Short Distance + Optimized Network = Fast Load Times

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Faster: Global CloudFront Network
Europe
Amsterdam (2)
Dublin
Frankfurt (2)
London (2)
Madrid
Milan
Paris (2)
Stockholm
Asia
Hong Kong (2)
Osaka
Seoul
Singapore (2)
Tokyo (2)
South America
Sao Paulo
North America
Ashburn, VA (2)
Dallas, TX (2)
Hayward, CA
Jacksonville, FL
Los Angeles, CA (2)
Miami, FL
Newark, NJ
New York, NY (3)
Palo Alto, CA
Seattle, WA
San Jose, CA
South Bend, IN
St. Louis, MO
Australia
Sydney

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Faster: Optimized Network Paths
Dynamic Content
Static Content
Amazon CloudFront
www.example.com
*.jpg
*.php
Low Latency
TCP/IP Window Sizing
Persistent Connections
Monitored Network Paths

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CloudFront can make your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less

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Scale Better: How CloudFront Helps
Caching static content at the Edge.
Offloading connection set-up and SSL negotiation to the Edge.
Persistent connections and collapse forwarding help scale your
origin.

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CloudFront can make your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less

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More Available: How CloudFront Helps
CloudFront is architected for high availability.
Serve cached content even when origin is unavailable.
Availability SLA.

20. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
CloudFront can make your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less

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Easier to Manage: How CloudFront Helps
No need to write any custom code.
Multiple origins and cache behaviors make it easy to architect for
whole site delivery.
Self service signup and configuration via AWS Management
Console and APIs.

22. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
CloudFront can make your web applications…….
Faster
Scale Better
More Available
Easier to Manage
Cost Less

23. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
Cost Less: How CloudFront Helps
Same price for dynamic and static content!
Preferential pricing on origin fetches from S3 and EC2. NEW!
CloudFront is less expensive than AWS Data Transfer (over 10 TB per month).
Reserved Capacity Pricing for reduced rates with commitment.

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Configuring CloudFront for Whole Site Delivery
Demo

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Demo

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Demo

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Demo

28. Cloudfront @
The Toronto Star
Stephen Evans
Head of Digital Technology

29. About The Toronto Star
• Canada’s largest daily newspaper
• Focused on metro Toronto
• 3.3 million monthly unique visitors
• Small in-house digital group,
technology team supported by
vendors & corporate IT
• Digital group run as “startup” within
corporate structure
• Tech stack includes Java, PHP, Ruby
• Relaunched flagship site thestar.com
on Adobe CQ5 on Jan. 30, 2013

30. Why AWS?
• Rebuild of thestar.com, tech team, hosting infrastructure
• Evaluated various cloud-hosting options – capability, price
• Ran short pilot phase
• AWS clear overall winner in terms of flexibility, feature set,
price
• Began migration of smaller sites Spring 2012
• Ongoing migration culminating thestar.com January 2013

31. Why CloudFront?
• Evaluated CloudFront vs. various more established players
• CloudFront addressed all priority feature requirements
• Validated performance claims via prelaunch load testing
• Simplicity of configuration a clear advantage
• Ambitious roadmap to release additional features
• Clear price and pricing model advantages

32. Architecture
Production - US East Region
Elastic Load Balancer
Dispatcher/Apache
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1 Medium
Dispatcher/Apache
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1 Medium
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Master
Author CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Dispatcher/Apache
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1 Medium
Availability Zone A Availability Zone DAvailability Zone B
Cloudfront
VPC
Standby
Author CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge
Publish CQ/CRX
Amazon Linux 64 Bit
C1-Xlarge

33. Whole Site Delivery
• Cache everything possible
• No server side cookies written, only select pages pass query
strings
• Control caching granularly using 19 different rules
• Use distributed load testing to validate performance against
multiple CloudFront edge locations
• We use a single origin, but ELB and multi-tiered multi-AZ
configuration on backend
• Planning a multi-region DR architecture that will also leverage
CloudFront

34. Client Side Cookies

35. Behaviours

40. Success Metrics
• 50% response time
improvement
• 99.99% uptime since
relaunch (100% after
launch day)
• Business impact: lower
hosting cost, improved
consumer experience, SEO

41. Lessons Learned
• Understand the constraints of using a CDN and CloudFront
specifically up front
• Whole site caching presents unique challenges that are
different from static asset caching – cookies, post requests
• The CDN does not remove the need to ensure your origin is
scalable and has its own caching tiers
• Think about reporting requirements - how will you track
usage?
• Engage with the business on caching rules – what behaviours
will be applied to what parts of your site?

42. Thanks!
Ping me
sevans@thestar.ca
@stephenaevans

43. NPR: Whole Site Delivery
Scaling npr.org for the Election Night '12 and beyond.
Irakli Nadareishvili
Director of Engineering, Digital Media, @NPR
Twitter: @inadarei @NPRTechTeam

44. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Election Night:
Olympics of the News Websites
http://bit.ly/npraws

45. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Traffic Spike:
http://bit.ly/npraws

46. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Preparation is Key
Measure, Improve, Repeat.
http://bit.ly/npraws

47. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Step 1: Measure
http://bit.ly/npraws
https://github.com/npr/ec2-fleet

48. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Bottlenecks:
1. Pipeline
2. Geography
http://bit.ly/npraws

49. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Solution:
Serve HTML through a CDN.
...but how?
http://bit.ly/npraws

50. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Scalability:
Every Second Counts
http://bit.ly/npraws

51. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
Pitfalls:
1. No user-specific content...
Sortof.
2. Could not CDN API
3. Content expiration takes
long time.
http://bit.ly/npraws

52. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei
We Use Multiple CDNs
http://bit.ly/npraws

53. Irakli Nadareishvili @inadarei http://bit.ly/npraws
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/03/ranking-the-slowest-
loading-news-sites-and-how-they-can-speed-up074.html

54. NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
Thank you.
Irakli Nadareishvili
twitter: @inadarei
http://bit.ly/npraws

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56. © 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com,
Resources
Get Started at: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
Office Hours with CloudFront Engineers
June 19th, 2013 at 10 am Pacific (1PM Eastern)
Sign-Up: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

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Thank You!
nihar@amazon.com