Introducing the Amazon CloudFront VPC Origin: Improved protection and more efficient use of your apps

I’m happy to inform you that the Amazon CloudFront Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) origins has launched, a new feature that allows businesses to serve content from apps housed in private subnets inside their Amazon VPC. This makes it simple to protect web apps, so you can concentrate on expanding your company while enhancing security and preserving great speed and worldwide scalability with CloudFront.

Origin Access Control is a managed service that allows customers to safeguard their origins and make CloudFront the only front-door to your application when serving content via Amazon Simple Storage service (Amazon S3), AWS Elemental Services, and AWS Lambda Function URLs. For apps that employ load balancers or are hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), this was more challenging to accomplish because you had to come up with your own method to get the same outcome. To guarantee that the endpoint remained exclusive to CloudFront, you would need to employ a variety of strategies, including monitoring firewall rules, employing logic like header validation, and using access control lists (ACLs).

By providing a managed solution that can be used to send CloudFront distributions to Application Load Balancers (ALBs), Network Load Balancers (NLBs), or EC2 instances inside your private subnets, CloudFront VPC origins eliminates the requirement for this type of undifferentiated effort. Because it also removes the need for public IP addresses, this guarantees that CloudFront will be the only point of entry for those resources with the least amount of configuration work, giving you better performance and the chance to save money.

Setting up CloudFront VPC Origin

The fact that CloudFront VPC origins is free of charge means that any AWS client can use it. Using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or the Amazon CloudFront console, it may be linked with both new and pre-existing CloudFront distributions.

Consider that you have a private AWS Fargate application for Amazon ECS that is fronted by an ALB. Using the ALB directly within the private subnet, let’s build a CloudFront distribution.

To begin, open the CloudFront dashboard and choose the newly added VPC origins menu item.Image credit to AWS

It’s easy to create a new VPC origin. There aren’t many options for you to choose from. You can either input the Origin ARN directly or search for resources hosted in private subnets. You pick the resources you want, give your VPC origin a catchy name, set up some security settings, and then confirm. Although support for resources across all accounts is on the horizon, please take note that the VPC origin resource must be in the same AWS Account as the CloudFront distribution at launch.

Your VPC origin will be deployed and operational after the creation procedure is finished! On the VPC origins page, you can see its current state.

By doing this, it has developed a CloudFront distribution that, with just a few clicks, can serve content straight from a resource hosted on a private subnet! Once your VPC origin has been built, you can go to your Distribution window and copy and paste the ARN or choose it from the dropdown menu to add the VPC origin to your Distribution.

To achieve full-spectrum protection, keep in mind that you should still layer your application’s security using services like AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to guard against web vulnerabilities, AWS Shield for managed DDoS protection, and others.

In conclusion

By allowing CloudFront distributions to serve content directly from resources hosted within private subnets, CloudFront VPC Origins provides a new means for enterprises to create high-performance, secure applications. This keeps your application safe while lowering the difficulty and expense of maintaining sources that are visible to the public.