# Amazon CloudFront

24 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon CloudFront and 11 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for cheap, fast content delivery with a free tier and tight S3 integration. Critics note its SLA is only three 9s.

## Why people recommend it

- Free tier and low cost (7 comments): "AWS just yesterday launched flat rate pricing for their CDN (including a flat rate allowance for bandwidth and S3 storage), including a guaranteed $0 tier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981352)) "AWS CloudFront is free up to 1TB bandwidth and 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests per month." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106882)) "So my website is on edge locations all over the world as part of their CDN for free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933069))
- Strong fit with S3 storage (4 comments): "it looks compelling if your primary use case is serving data out of S3" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703638)) "exposing S3 data with CloudFront will decrease the transport cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926393)) "AWS Cloudfront + S3 is basically free for tiny sites." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49667090))
- Fast and reliable in practice (3 comments): "we've had two recent issues -- both with cloudfront -- that were dealt with fairly promptly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260934)) "CloudFront, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, and IPv6 support are all best-in-class." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294327)) "It's fast and inexpensive, and so far perfectly solid." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45967584))
- Scales without extra work (2 comments): "served millions of page views for next to nothing because most pages were already in the cache" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49029146)) "cloudfront scales to that level without work needed on my side" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49217805))

## What people warn about

- Complex cache and origin configuration (2 comments): "Many CDNs do not support arbitrary Vary headers. Cloudfront, for example asks you to create a "Cache and Origin Request Policies"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459899)) "2-3 hours of config per project, every single time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46859577))
- Occasional outages and errors (3 comments): "It looks a lot like a CloudFront error we randomly saw today from one of our engineers in South America." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45975110)) "we've had two recent issues -- both with cloudfront -- that were dealt with fairly promptly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260934)) "all of my Cloudfront-hosted files were just unavailable on my business' site" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652050))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Cloudflare](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare.md): 744 recommend
- [Bunny.net](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bunny-net.md): 121 recommend
- [Cloudflare CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cloudflare-cdn.md): 12 recommend
- [Fastly CDN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fastly.md): 10 recommend
- [Cloudflare Workers Cache](https://hackerapproved.com/p/workers-cache.md): 10 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Amazon CloudFront", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-cloudfront/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).