The Importance of a CDN: How to Speed Up Apps with AWS CloudFront

For web and mobile apps speed and reliability are crucial. We recently helped Stornaway optimise their AWS CloudFront implementation, a powerful Content Delivery Network (CDN), to enhance their app’s performance.

What is a CDN? 🤔

A CDN helps deliver website content faster by storing copies at various locations worldwide, called edge locations. When someone accesses your website or app, the CDN sends the content from the location closest to them, speeding up delivery.

If the content isn’t already stored there, the CDN retrieves it from the main server (known as the origin server, such as an Amazon S3 bucket) and saves a copy for future use.

A CDN like Amazon’s AWS CloudFront is essential for businesses aiming to globally deliver content quickly. For platforms like Stornaway, it’s a game-changer that ensures a seamless user experience.

Key Benefits of a CDN

Faster Load Times: Content is served from the closest edge location, ensuring quick delivery.
Reduced Server Load: The CDN handles the bulk of traffic, allowing origin servers to scale more efficiently.
Flexibility: Easily switch between test and production environments with minimal configuration.

Do I Need a CDN? 🤷‍♂️

If your app includes many videos, images, or JavaScript files and serves users globally, using a CDN is highly recommended.

For Stornaway, ensuring their video player loaded quickly was a top priority. Implementing a CDN helped maintain fast, consistent performance for users worldwide, regardless of their location.

Our Approach For Stornaway ⏰

We integrated AWS’s CloudFront CDN with Active Storage in Stornaway’s Rails application. AWS’s CloudFront CDN was chosen because the application's assets were already stored in an AWS S3 bucket.

This meant doing a few key steps:

Configuring Amazon S3 as the origin for static and video files.
Setting up CloudFront distributions for global caching.
Enabling proxy mode in Active Storage for secure, dynamic URLs.
Optimising caching policies for improved performance.
Updating all references to call the CDN where possible, while leaving a fallback for any old URLs.

Curious to find out more about the platform? Check out this intro to Stornaway 👀

Results 🏆

The results were significant: faster load times, smoother video playback, reduced server strain, and improved resilience during traffic surges.

“With tens of thousands of customer projects in the wild already using ActiveRecord to serve millions of images, we wanted to trust it to mmtm to make this change thoughtfully and sustainably.

They've done so much great work for us in partnership with our in-house team!”

Ru Howe, Inventor of Stornaway and Chief Design & Technology Officer