CloudFront or Amazon S3?

Both CloudFront and Amazon S3 serve content. Should you use CloudFront to serve all your content? Not necessarily. It depends on your particular needs.

Amazon S3 is designed to store the original, definitive version of your files. It is optimized for high durability and cost-effective application storage and data transfer.

CloudFront is designed to distribute your most popular content with low latency. It is not designed for durable storage. Copies of your popular objects are stored in edge locations close to end users on the Internet; if an object isn’t accessed frequently it might be removed from an edge location. For objects that are served many times, CloudFront can lower the cost of delivery while providing a faster download experience.

If you expect a large number of requests for each of your files, CloudFront provides higher performance than Amazon S3 alone, because objects are stored closer to end users’ locations. You might also find CloudFront a more cost-effective choice than Amazon S3 for delivery of popular objects due to its lower charges for data transfer at higher usage tiers.