When an internet user sends a request from Seoul to a US East server, ~180ms round-trip latency results. The speed of light limit. CDN's (Content Delivery Network) origin was circumventing this physical law. When Akamai first launched commercial CDN in 1998, the idea was simple: "Copy content close to users." Yet 2024's CloudFront far exceeds simple caching. It's an edge platform integrating security layer (WAF, Shield, OAC), compute layer (Lambda@Edge, CloudFront Functions), and access control (Signed URL/Cookie, Field-Level Encryption).
In SAP-C02, CloudFront appears standalone but more often in combination scenarios with WAF, Shield, S3, API Gateway, ALB