Introducing Caching to a Serverless Application with CloudFront

Course details

The performance of a website or web application is perhaps the most important aspect of your site. Without good performance, people will often abandon your site regardless of what it offers. Caching has become one of the most popular and effective ways to speed up the delivery of content to users that have little patience for underperforming websites or applications. In this course, Brett McLaughlin shows you how a powerful, flexible, low-cost caching mechanism like AWS CloudFront can help you build and support performance web sites and applications. Brett demonstrates how to use CloudFront to do everything from basic caching of a static website, to fronting an API gateway with Lambda calls and providing dynamic content. Lastly, he explains how authentication and authorization figure into caching, along with more advanced next steps to explore in caching.

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Increase your serverless site's performance with CloudFront
02 - The power of performance and caching
03 - Using the exercise files
04 - A few helpful videos to watch first

1. Adding CloudFront to a Static Website

05 - Set up an S3 bucket for website hosting
06 - Deploy a website to an S3 bucket
07 - Verify the origin of the website files you access
08 - Create a CloudFront web distribution
09 - Verify cache usage with Chrome network monitor
10 - Update your DNS records to point to CloudFront

2. Adding CloudFront to a Serverless Application with Amplify

11 - Web applications are just interactive websites
12 - Setting up hosting with Amplify is setting up CloudFront
13 - Examine an Amplify-generated hosting setup
14 - Use the console and the CLI to configure your distribution
15 - Remember to keep verifying caching
16 - Remove your CloudFront distribution when you don't need it

3. Adding CloudFront to Cache API Gateway Results

17 - Cache requests to API endpoints
18 - Mock a GET endpoint in an API gateway
19 - Deploy your API and test with curl
20 - Create a CloudFront distribution
21 - Test your distribution with curl and CloudWatch

4. Restricting S3 Content Using CloudFront and Lambda@Edge

22 - Visualize authentication and authorization in your flow
23 - Create a new lambda function
24 - Add a lambda function to AWS
25 - Set up a new trust relationship for your lambda function
26 - Instruct CloudFront to invoke your lambda function
27 - Test out authentication on your CloudFront distribution

Conclusion

28 - Go further with caching