Replacing varnish with aws cloudfront

Question

Recently came across an article on using AWS CloudFront to deliver the whole site, instead of using Varnish as reverse proxy. Is it really better than Varnish, especially in case of Magento?

Answer 1

Varnish is a Caching Reverse Proxy while CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network. My suggestion: If you are looking at serving content all over the world, go with CloudFront. If you're just serving to a local user base, simply fire up a high memory instance and install Varnish and serve content off Varnish. This takes time, but is definitely worth the effort.

Here's a useful link: https://fournines.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/improving-page-speed-cdn-vs-squid-varnish-nginx/

Answer 2

Varnish is page level caching while Cloudfront is CDN. Varnish has a programming language called vcl which provides you ultimate flexibility in setting redirects etc. Also it prvides lot of modules to lot of wonderful thinngs, Varnish and Cloudfront are not competitiors