Q12: Reducing Latency for Both Static and Dynamic Content on a Global Web App

Problem Info

Domain	Design High-Performing Architectures
Services	Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Application Load Balancer, Amazon Route 53
Difficulty	Easy–Medium

Question

A global company hosts a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Static data is stored in S3; dynamic data comes from the application tier. The company wants to improve performance and reduce latency for both static and dynamic data, using its own domain registered in Route 53.

What should a solutions architect do?

Correct Answer

Create a CloudFront distribution with two origins — the S3 bucket and the ALB. Configure Route 53 to route the domain’s traffic to the CloudFront distribution.

Why this is correct

The requirement covers two different content types with one latency goal, and CloudFront is the single service that addresses both simultaneously.

CloudFront distributions support multiple origins with path-based behaviors: you can route requests like /static/* to the S3 bucket origin (cached at edge locations close to every global user) and everything else (e.g., /api/*) to the ALB origin for dynamic content. Even dynamic requests benefit from CloudFront: traffic travels over Amazon’s optimized backbone network from the nearest edge location to the origin, instead of the public internet the whole way — reducing latency even for content that can’t be cached.

Since the company already owns a domain in Route 53, pointing an alias record at the CloudFront distribution’s domain name means users worldwide resolve straight to their nearest edge location — no extra infrastructure, minimal changes to the existing setup.

Why the alternatives fall short

• Create two separate CloudFront distributions, one per origin — technically works but adds unnecessary complexity (two distributions, two sets of settings, potentially two different domains/paths to manage) when one distribution with multiple origins does the job.
• Use S3 Transfer Acceleration for the static content and leave dynamic content as-is — improves upload speed to S3, not download/serving latency to end users, and does nothing for the ALB-served dynamic content at all.
• Deploy the application in every AWS Region and use Route 53 latency-based routing — a valid pattern for truly global HA and lowest ping to compute, but it’s a much larger operational lift (multi-region deployment, data replication) than the question’s ask, and doesn’t specifically address caching static content at the edge.

Exam Tip

“Global users” + “static AND dynamic content” + “reduce latency” + “single domain” → CloudFront with multiple origins. Remember CloudFront isn’t just a static-content cache — even purely dynamic, uncacheable traffic gets a latency boost by riding CloudFront’s edge network back to the origin over AWS’s private backbone.