Whole Site Delivery with Amazon CloudFront
Alex Dunlap
Sr. Manager, Amazon Web Services

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

What is Whole Site Delivery?

Personalized Website Example
Dynamic
Static

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

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

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

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

Why use CloudFront for Whole Site Delivery?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Configuring CloudFront for Whole Site Delivery
Demo

Demo

Demo

Demo

Cloudfront @
The Toronto Star
Stephen Evans
Head of Digital Technology
April 18, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Client Side Cookies

Behaviours

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

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?

Thanks!
Ping me
sevans@thestar.ca
@stephenaevans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions?
Irakli Nadareishvili
twitter: @inadarei
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO http://bit.ly/npraws

Resources
Get Started at: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
Office Hours with CloudFront Engineers
May 9th, 1 pm Eastern (10 am Pacific)
Sign-Up: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/594793282

Thank You!
dunlap@amazon.com