New feature: AWS CloudFront integration

Following the Cloudflare integration released 4 weeks ago, we're happy to announce BuddyWorks now officially supports AWS CloudFront

AWS CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network that shortens the time required to access your website.

How CloudFront works

Let's assume you have a server where you host your website. The further the distance from the server, the longer the visitor must wait to access the site:

Serving website without CDN

A Content Delivery Network like CloudFront allows you to cache the sources of your website in multiple locations spread around the globe. This way your website is served from the closest location to the visitor, allowing you to maintain high loading and response times:

Serving website with CDN

Invalidating CloudFront after deployment

Almost all developers who signed up for BuddyWorks have at least one deployment action in their pipelines. Adding the CloudFront integration means you can now automatically purge your CloudFront's cache on every deployment. All you need to do is add the CloudFront action at the end of the line:

Pipeline with CloudFront

Similarly to Cloudflare, you can select the distribution (zone) and the path that you want to invalidate and decide whether to purge the whole cache or only the files that have been deployed:

CloudFront action details

INFO: Until now, you could already invalidate CloudFront in the AWS S3 deployment action. We have left this option available for the time being, but eventually it will be removed in favor of the new action. If you use the invalidation in your S3 actions, you will be notified one month in advance before it happens so that you have enough time to reconfigure your pipelines.