Edge Locations

An edge location is a site that Amazon CloudFront uses to store cached copies of your content closer to your customers for faster delivery.

Origin

Suppose that your company’s data is stored in Brazil, and you have customers who live in China. To provide content to these customers, you don’t need to move all the content to one of the Chinese Regions.

Edge Location

Instead of requiring your customers to get their data from Brazil, you can cache a copy locally at an edge location that is close to your customers in China.

Customer

When a customer in China requests one of your files, Amazon CloudFront retrieves the file from the cache in the edge location and delivers the file to the customer. The file is delivered to the customer faster because it came from the edge location near China instead of the original source in Brazil.