What Is Amazon CloudFront?

Further suppose that the web server from which you’re serving the image is in Seattle, Washington, USA, and that a user in Austin, Texas, USA requests the image. The traceroute list below (courtesy of www.WatchMouse.com) shows one way that this request could be routed.

WatchMouse

 

U.S. map

In this example, the request was routed 10 times within the United States before the image was retrieved, which is not an unusually large number of hops. If your user were in Europe, the request would be routed through even more networks to reach your server in Seattle. The number of networks and the distance that the request and the image must travel have a significant impact on the performance, reliability, and availability of the image.