Amazon Web Services Inc. is beefing up the capabilities of its Amazon CloudFront content delivery network, enabling more lightweight customizations for users at the network edge.

Amazon Cloudfront is a fast content delivery network service that’s used by customers to deliver data, videos, applications and application programming interfaces securely to users globally with high transfer speeds and low latency, within a developer-friendly environment.

It does this by delivering content from the closest edge location within Amazon’s worldwide network of data centers. When a user requests content that’s being served through CloudFront, the request is routed to whichever edge location provides the lowest latency, so that the content is delivered in the fastest possible time.

Amazon CloudFront Functions is a new feature launched today that makes it easier for customers to deliver richer and more personalized content for users in different locations at the same low latencies, the company said. Users can run JavaScript functions, which are unique bits of code designed to perform a particular task, specific to one of the 218 CloudFront edge locations.

Some examples Amazon provides includes writing HTTP header manipulations, which enables a request to be directed to a specific language version of a website based on the Accept-Language header of the incoming request, and URL redirects or rewrites.

Previously the only way to deliver these kinds of customizations in Amazon CloudFront was through AWS Lambda@Edge. However, AWS Chief Evangelist Danilo Poccia said Lambda@Edge is more suited for complex and compute-heavy functions rather than the lightweight customizations it’s addressing with CloudFront Functions.

As such, Lambda@Edge functions are performed at a regional edge location where more compute power is available, rather than at the closest possible edge location to each user. This makes them slower to deliver and means customizations cannot be unique to each edge location.

“To give you the performance and scale that modern applications require, CloudFront Functions uses a new process-based isolation model instead of virtual machine-based isolation as used by AWS Lambda and Lambda@Edge,” Poccia said.

Amazon said CloudFront Functions is natively built-in to the CloudFront service, so users can build, test and deploy viewer request and response functions from within its user interface. Users can then create their functions from within the CloudFront console via an integrated development environment, or alternatively from the CloudFront API or command line interface, Poccia said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that network speeds and costs matter, and so Amazon is bringing its cloud capabilities to corporate data centers and edge locations. “Amazon CloudFront Functions makes it easier for enterprises to implement edge-based applications in the 200-plus CloudFront locations worldwide,” he said. “It will enable more efficient next-generation applications by bringing the code closer to localized data.”

Best of all, Poccia said CloudFront Functions are much cheaper, at around one-sixth of the price of Lambda@Edge functions, with the service priced at $0.1 per million invocations.

Image: AWS