Cost Saving Tips : Part 3 : Using Amazon CloudFront Price Class to minimize costs

Amazon CloudFront is used for content delivery and has edge locations all over the world. Amazon CloudFront minimizes end user latency by delivering content from its entire global network of edge locations. Since the cost for each edge location varies, AWS charges also vary depending on the edge location from which CloudFront request is served.

Imagine you are an owner of an online application which has user access only from USA and Europe region. Leveraging Amazon CloudFront global edge locations might lead to leakage of cost in this case. Instead of content getting unnecessarily replicated in the edge locations around world, it is better if you can only use the nearest edge locations to serve your users. Amazon CloudFront has an option called Price class for saving CDN costs.  They have grouped the edge locations into following price classes namely:

Class ALL: This default price class includes all regions

Class 200: Only USA, Europe, HK, Singapore and Japan

Class 100: Only USA and Europe

More classes and categories will be added in future by AWS.

Price class provides you an option to lower the prices you pay to deliver content out of Amazon CloudFront. You can choose the best price class fitting your user base. Example: In this case you can choose Price Class 100 to serve the contents instead of whole global edge locations. You can select the price class in AWS console as illustrated in the screenshot:

This configurable option lets you reduce your delivery prices by excluding Amazon CloudFront’s more expensive edge locations from your Amazon CloudFront distribution.

Note: If you choose the price class that includes only the United States and Europe, viewers in Australia and in Asia may experience higher latency than if you choose the price class that includes Australia and Asia.



Other Tips

Cost Saving Tip 1: Amazon SQS Long Polling and Batch requests
Cost Saving Tip 2: How right search technology choice saves cost in AWS ?
Cost Saving Tip 3: Using Amazon CloudFront Price Class to minimize costs
Cost Saving Tip 4 : Right Sizing Amazon ElastiCache Cluster
Cost Saving Tip 5: How Amazon Auto Scaling can save costs ?
Cost Saving Tip 6: Amazon Auto Scaling Termination policy and savings
Cost Saving Tip 7: Use Amazon S3 Object Expiration
Cost Saving Tip 8: Use Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage