Saving Money On Data Transfer Costs With Amazon CloudFront

Cut down on data transfer costs by caching content closer to users

Author

Uriel Bitton
January 19, 2025

Data transfers are one of the more significant elements that add up your AWS bill each month.

One highly effective way to optimize these data transfer costs is to store data closer to your users and serve it on request.

Cached data can be thought of a recycling method; the same data can be served from the cache to thousands of users rather than make those requests to the database, server or storage.

How CloudFront helps

CloudFront caches your data at edge locations around the world. Instead of your users fetching the data directly from your servers each time, they can instead get the data from the nearest edge location.

Not only does this lower the latency but it also significantly reduces costs on data transfers.

On top of that, CloudFront offers free outbound data transfers. This means that you only pay for what you transfer from your origin to CloudFront, which is already much cheaper than direct transfers to the internet.

Getting Started with CloudFront

Setting up CloudFront is straightforward, you can easily integrate it with other AWS services like S3, and EC2.

Once its setup, CloudFront will start caching your data and optimizing data delivery right away.

You can further optimize cached content by enabling compression on your assets. Compressed files are smaller and therefore enable reduced data transfer costs and speed.

One Tip To Save Costs

“You can increase the cache duration for static content like images and files by setting longer TTL in the Cache-control headers. This reduces the frequency of requests to your origin server, cutting down on data transfer costs.”

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Curated Article

  1. “Building a serverless gallery with ”. Lambda, S3 and CloudFront. By Uriel Bitton. July 30, 2024. https://medium.com/aws-in-plain-english/building-a-serverless-photo-gallery-with-aws-lambda-s3-cloudfront-2d4bb6afa1f8

  2. “AWS Cloudfront Tutorial: Setup and Configuration”. By Matt Mickiewicz. March 30, 2023. https://www.sitepoint.com/aws-cloudfront-tutorial-setup-and-configuration/