A CDN is now a necessity rather than a luxury — Google's Core Web Vitals make performance a ranking factor, and users abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. Cloudflare and AWS CloudFront are the two most popular choices, but they serve quite different use cases.
Cloudflare's magic is in its simplicity: change your DNS nameservers, and within minutes your site is behind Cloudflare's network. The free tier includes DDoS protection, SSL, and basic caching — features that would cost hundreds per month with other providers.
AWS CloudFront is deeply integrated with the AWS ecosystem, making it the natural choice if you're already running on AWS. It integrates natively with S3, EC2, and Lambda@Edge, enabling sophisticated use cases like server-side rendering at the edge.
For most developers and small businesses, Cloudflare's free tier is remarkably capable. For complex AWS-native architectures or when you need granular cache control per content type, CloudFront is worth the additional complexity.
