How CloudFront Delivers Traffic to AWS Workloads

Traffic delivery on AWS often starts at the edge and moves inward toward application resources. In many architectures, Amazon CloudFront acts as the entry point, handling client requests before they ever reach your VPC. To design these setups correctly, it helps to look at how CloudFront actually connects to backend services and what role networking plays in that path. This article walks through how CloudFront forwards requests to AWS workloads, how common origin configurations work, and how newer options like VPC origins change the picture. CloudFront’s Position in the Architecture CloudFront is a global content delivery network that operates outside your VPC. Requests from users are received at edge locations and then forwarded to an origin when needed. That origin can be a storage service, a load balancer, or another AWS-managed endpoint. Even though CloudFront integrates tightly with Amazon Web Services , it does not run inside your VPC. This separation is intentional. CloudFront f