Question #988
A company hosts a static website on Amazon EC2 instances and wants to ensure the lowest possible latency for users globally. The solution must maintain EC2 as the origin server.
Which approach best meets these requirements?
Deploy EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions and use Route 53 latency-based routing.
Use an Application Load Balancer to distribute traffic across EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones.
Configure Amazon CloudFront to distribute content with the EC2 instances as the origin.
Implement AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic to EC2 instances through the AWS backbone network.
Explanation
Option C is correct because Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations globally. This minimizes latency by serving content from the nearest edge location to users, even though the origin remains EC2. CloudFront reduces the need for repeated requests to the origin, which is ideal for static websites.
Other options:
- A: Deploying EC2 in multiple regions with Route 53 latency routing requires managing infrastructure across regions and does not cache content, leading to higher costs and complexity.
- B: An Application Load Balancer distributes traffic within a single region's Availability Zones, improving regional availability but not addressing global latency.
- D: AWS Global Accelerator optimizes routing via AWS's backbone but does not cache content, so requests still reach the origin (EC2), resulting in higher latency compared to CloudFront.
Key Takeaway: For static content with EC2 as the origin, CloudFront's edge caching provides the lowest global latency.
Answer
The correct answer is: C