CloudFront Performance
- Measuring CDN performance is done by
- Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Synthetic monitoring.
- RUM process of measuring performance while real end users are interacting with a web application.
- Synthetic monitoring, requests are proactively sent by external agents configured to mimic actual web traffic.
- For RUM
- Throughput and latency metrics can measure downloads of the exact object(s) served by an application.
- It measures actual workload and gives most accurate view of what end users will experience.
- For
availability, configurations custom to application such as
- request retries
- connection/response timeouts
- different error codes (HTTP 4xx/5xx).
- Some applications may consider retries acceptable, while others may never attempt to retry.
- For Synthetic monitoring
- simulate web traffic from different geographies
- two forms of testing
- Backbone
- providers use nodes installed in colocated data centers around the world.
- These servers have direct fiber connectivity to various network providers (both transit providers and internet service providers) like Verizon, NTT, ATT.
- Last mile
- providers install agents in computers of real end users
- deploy small test nodes connected to routers of real end users in their home network.
- Nodes give perspective performance for end users by their ISPs
- Backbone
- Best Practices
- use RUM over synthetic monitoring
- Understand your workload before configuring synthetic tests
- Match your demographic
- Be aware of timeouts
- Test over long periods
- Deep dive to understand anomalies.
- Recommended to use
- AWS Billing and Usage Reports for CloudFront
- CloudFront Reports in the Console
- Tracking Configuration Changes with AWS Config
- Configuring and Using Access Logs
- Using AWS CloudTrail to Capture Requests Sent to the CloudFront API
- Monitoring CloudFront and Setting Alarms
- Tagging Amazon CloudFront Distributions
