Cloudfront is now offered as a standard inclusive service for all Audienceware clients, The benefits to clients are:
- Faster performance - reduced bot traffic on all servers and websites, faster delivery of cached data
- Security - ‘network level’ front line defence from intruders and unwanted traffic
What is Cloudfront and how does it work
Cloudfront is a CDN (Content Delivery Network), which is an array of connected ‘edge’ servers around the world that can cache and deliver website content locally, reducing latency and load on the original server. CDN’s are commonly used for this purpose, and can also help reduce energy consumption.
Cloudfront integrates with WAF (Web Access Firewall), which uses a comprehensive set of rules to block traffic, allowing only traffic that ‘passes’ acceptable criteria. Many of these rules are managed by AWS, including known bad agents and suspicious behaviour patterns, as well as custom rules to further defend or add exceptions e.g. PayPal callbacks.
Audienceware servers receive over 15M hits collectively, even after Cloudfront is applied, such is the amount of bot and crawler traffic today, so the mission to improve traffic management remains ongoing.
Performance Tuning
Where applicable, custom ‘behaviours’ can be added to cache parts of a website e.g. all public media, so that the media will be served by edge servers, creating faster load times for the user, avoiding the need to hit the server again for repeatable requests.
Exceptions can be defined where user input is required, or rapidly changing dynamic pages that need to be frequently requests.
How Clients can help
Client feedback and support requests help sharpen the focus to specific web pages which may need caching or exceptions, or are susceptible to high load due to bot traffic that is accepted through the network, which can include both reputable bots like search engines or AI, as well as unreputable bots looking to create spam or other bad behaviour.
Cloudfront and WAF are billable services from AWS, as well as Audienceware Support Team costs to configure, and regularly manage, monitor and tune Cloudfront for the best experience. Audienceware’s clients enable us to allocate appropriate resources to the task, and keep this service affordable through our subscription program and participation in the AWS Consolidated Billing, and Credits program for Not-for-Profits.
Contact us for more information.