Posted On: Nov 30, 2016
Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon CloudFront has added a new type of edge location called Regional Edge Cache that further improves performance for your viewers. Regional Edge Caches, in addition to improving performance, also help reduce the load on your origin resources, minimizing operational burden associated with scaling your origin and reducing your origin costs. Regional Edge Caches are turned on by default for your CloudFront distributions; you do not need to make any changes to your distributions to take advantage of this feature. There are also no additional charges to use this feature.
The nine new Regional Edge Cache locations are in Northern Virginia, Oregon, São Paulo, Frankfurt, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Sydney. These locations sit between your origin webserver and the 68 global edge locations that serve traffic directly to your viewers. As the popularity of your objects reduce, individual edge locations may evict those objects to make room for more popular content. Regional Edge Caches have larger cache-width than any individual edge location, so your objects remain in cache longer at these locations. This helps keep more of your content closer to your viewers, reducing the need for CloudFront to go back to your origin webserver, and improving overall performance for viewers. For instance, our edge locations in Europe now go to the regional edge cache in Frankfurt to fetch an object before going back to your origin webserver.
To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge network locations, please see our edge network locations list here. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, see the Amazon CloudFront product page.