When to use Amazon Cloudfront or S3

Question

Are there use cases that lend themselves better to Amazon cloudfront over s3 or the other way around? I'm trying to understand the difference between the 2 through examples.

Answer 1

Amazon CloudFront is some kind of Content Delivery Network (CDN), that takes its data from S3. What actually does is replicate the S3 data in different locations, so that...

When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. (Amazon)

That's the main difference, and you take advantage of it when your user base is "spread around the world". So...

• If your user base is localized, you won't see too much difference working with S3 or CloudFront (but you have to choose the right location for your S3 bucket: US, EU, APAC).
• If your user base is spread, CloudFront should be a better option.

Another difference is that CloudFront allows you to set different domain aliases for your CloudFront distribution:

• You can have for example d1.mystatics.com, d2.mystatics.com and d3.mystatics.com pointing to the same CloudFront distribution, allowing parallel downloads. (Google)