AWS CloudFront Now Supports WebSocket Protocol

Amazon's AWS CloudFront has started supporting WebSocket Protocol. It will help in improvements over performance and security for consumers.

Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service. Its purpose is to serve users with low latency data, videos, applications, and APIs at high transfer speeds.

The WebSocket protocol is an independent, TCP-based protocol. By default, WebSockets work either on HTTP port 80 or HTTPS port 443. Its purpose is to avoid unnecessary latency in HTTP protocol required for certain applications such as stock trading apps or chat applications. E.g. Server want to push the updated stock price to client's app or browser screen at a rapid rate. The client does not need to request server every time, the server does its job to push price updates directly to the client application.

The client (browser) can send a regular HTTP request but includes a header that requests an upgrade to WebSocket asking server to create a WebSocket connection. Yes, the server needs to support WebSocket. Once the connection is established, the client and server both can handshake data frames with each other without setting up a new HTTP connection.

WebSockets support to CloudFront means that all WebSocket traffic will go through CloudFront resources for your data without any additional configuration. Now developers will able to leverage WebSockets through CloudFront to design high performing software with same security that CloudFront offers.

The announcement said, "You can also use CloudFront’s global edge network to terminate SSL/TLS handshakes for WebSocket connections closer to your users and leverage AWS’ optimized network to improve your application’s responsiveness and reliability. You also get comprehensive DDOS protection by mitigating attacks closer to the source through AWS Shield and AWS WAF being tightly integrated with CloudFront."

There will not be any separate charges for using WebSockets with CloudFront however, standard CloudFront charges still apply.