All 7 Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery questions
More in Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery
What is Amazon CloudFront and how does it improve website performance? What types of origins can CloudFront distribute content from? How do you secure content delivered through CloudFront so only authorized users can access it? What role does CloudFront play in protecting applications from security threats? How do Lambda at Edge and CloudFront Functions extend the capabilities of a CloudFront distribution? How does CloudFront support multi region high availability and failover for an application?
Advertisement
AWS › Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery

How does caching work in CloudFront, and how do you control how long content stays cached?

Intermediate

Answer

CloudFront caches content at edge locations based on cache behaviors you configure, including a time to live value that controls how long an object is kept before CloudFront checks the origin again for a fresh copy, and you can also control caching using HTTP headers like Cache Control sent directly from your origin server.
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id ABC123 --paths '/images/*'
Real-world example An e commerce site sets a long cache duration for rarely changing product images but a very short cache duration for its frequently updated pricing page, balancing performance with data freshness.

Common follow-ups: What is a cache invalidation and when should you use one?;How do query strings affect CloudFront caching behavior?

Amazon API Gateway;S3 & Storage
All 7 Amazon CloudFront & Content Delivery questions