Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Request and response behavior for custom origins

How CloudFront processes and forwards requests to your custom origin

This topic contains information about how CloudFront processes viewer requests and forwards the requests to your custom origin.

Authentication

If you forward the Authorization header to your origin, you can then configure your origin server to request client authentication for the following types of requests:

For OPTIONS requests, client authentication can only be configured if you use the following CloudFront settings:

For more information, see Configuring CloudFront to forward the Authorization header.

You can use HTTP or HTTPS to forward requests to your origin server. For more information, see Using HTTPS with CloudFront.

Caching duration and minimum TTL

To control how long your objects stay in a CloudFront cache before CloudFront forwards another request to your origin, you can:

For more information, see Managing how long content stays in the cache (expiration).

Client IP addresses

If a viewer sends a request to CloudFront and does not include an X-Forwarded-For request header, CloudFront gets the IP address of the viewer from the TCP connection, adds an X-Forwarded-For header that includes the IP address, and forwards the request to the origin. For example, if CloudFront gets the IP address 192.0.2.2 from the TCP connection, it forwards the following header to the origin:

X-Forwarded-For: 192.0.2.2

If a viewer sends a request to CloudFront and includes an X-Forwarded-For request header, CloudFront gets the IP address of the viewer from the TCP connection, appends it to the end of the X-Forwarded-For header, and forwards the request to the origin. For example, if the viewer request includes X-Forwarded-For: 192.0.2.4,192.0.2.3 and CloudFront gets the IP address 192.0.2.2 from the TCP connection, it forwards the following header to the origin:

X-Forwarded-For: 192.0.2.4,192.0.2.3,192.0.2.2

Some applications, such as load balancers (including Elastic Load Balancing), web application firewalls, reverse proxies, intrusion prevention systems, and API Gateway, append the IP address of the CloudFront edge server that forwarded the request onto the end of the X-Forwarded-For header. For example, if CloudFront includes X-Forwarded-For: 192.0.2.2 in a request that it forwards to ELB and if the IP address of the CloudFront edge server is 192.0.2.199, the request that your EC2 instance receives contains the following header:

X-Forwarded-For: 192.0.2.2,192.0.2.199

Client-side SSL authentication

CloudFront does not support client authentication with client-side SSL certificates. If an origin requests a client-side certificate, CloudFront drops the request.

Compression

For more information, see Serving compressed files.

Conditional requests

When CloudFront receives a request for an object that has expired from an edge cache, it forwards the request to the origin either to get the latest version of the object or to get confirmation from the origin that the CloudFront edge cache already has the latest version. Typically, when the origin last sent the object to CloudFront, it included an ETag value, a LastModified value, or both values in the response. In the new request that CloudFront forwards to the origin, CloudFront adds one or both of the following:

The origin uses this information to determine whether the object has been updated and, therefore, whether to return the entire object to CloudFront or to return only an HTTP 304 status code (not modified).

Cookies

You can configure CloudFront to forward cookies to your origin. For more information, see Caching content based on cookies.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)

If you want CloudFront to respect cross-origin resource sharing settings, configure CloudFront to forward the Origin header to your origin. For more information, see Caching content based on request headers.

Encryption

You can require viewers to use HTTPS to send requests to CloudFront and require CloudFront to forward requests to your custom origin by using the protocol that is used by the viewer. For more information, see the following distribution settings:

CloudFront forwards HTTPS requests to the origin server using the SSLv3, TLSv1.0, TLSv1.1, and TLSv1.2 protocols. For custom origins, you can choose the SSL protocols that you want CloudFront to use when communicating with your origin:

If the origin is an Amazon S3 bucket, CloudFront always uses TLSv1.2.

For more information about using HTTPS with CloudFront, see Using HTTPS with CloudFront. For lists of the ciphers that CloudFront supports for HTTPS communication between viewers and CloudFront, and between CloudFront and your origin, see Supported protocols and ciphers between viewers and CloudFront.

GET requests that include a body

If a viewer GET request includes a body, CloudFront returns an HTTP status code 403 (Forbidden) to the viewer.

HTTP methods

If you configure CloudFront to process all of the HTTP methods that it supports, CloudFront accepts the following requests from viewers and forwards them to your custom origin:

CloudFront always caches responses to GET and HEAD requests. You can also configure CloudFront to cache responses to OPTIONS requests. CloudFront does not cache responses to requests that use the other methods.

For information about configuring whether your custom origin processes these methods, see the documentation for your origin.

HTTP request headers and CloudFront behavior (custom and Amazon S3 origins)

The following table lists HTTP request headers that you can forward to both custom and Amazon S3 origins (with the exceptions that are noted). For each header, the table includes information about the following:

For more information about caching based on header values, see Caching content based on request headers.

HTTP version

CloudFront forwards requests to your custom origin using HTTP/1.1.

Maximum length of a request and maximum length of a URL

The maximum length of a request, including the path, the query string (if any), and headers, is 20,480 bytes.

CloudFront constructs a URL from the request. The maximum length of this URL is 8192 bytes.

If a request or a URL exceeds these maximums, CloudFront returns HTTP status code 413, Request Entity Too Large, to the viewer, and then terminates the TCP connection to the viewer.

OCSP stapling

When a viewer submits an HTTPS request for an object, either CloudFront or the viewer must confirm with the certificate authority (CA) that the SSL certificate for the domain has not been revoked. OCSP stapling speeds up certificate validation by allowing CloudFront to validate the certificate and to cache the response from the CA, so the client doesn't need to validate the certificate directly with the CA.

The performance improvement of OCSP stapling is more pronounced when CloudFront receives numerous HTTPS requests for objects in the same domain. Each server in a CloudFront edge location must submit a separate validation request. When CloudFront receives a lot of HTTPS requests for the same domain, every server in the edge location soon has a response from the CA that it can "staple" to a packet in the SSL handshake; when the viewer is satisfied that the certificate is valid, CloudFront can serve the requested object. If your distribution doesn't get much traffic in a CloudFront edge location, new requests are more likely to be directed to a server that hasn't validated the certificate with the CA yet. In that case, the viewer separately performs the validation step and the CloudFront server serves the object. That CloudFront server also submits a validation request to the CA, so the next time it receives a request that includes the same domain name, it has a validation response from the CA.

Persistent connections

When CloudFront gets a response from your origin, it tries to maintain the connection for several seconds in case another request arrives during that period. Maintaining a persistent connection saves the time required to re-establish the TCP connection and perform another TLS handshake for subsequent requests.

For more information, including how to configure the duration of persistent connections, see Keep-alive timeout (custom origins only) in the section Values that you specify when you create or update a distribution.

Protocols

CloudFront forwards HTTP or HTTPS requests to the origin server based on the following:

If you specify HTTP Only or HTTPS Only, CloudFront forwards requests to the origin server using the specified protocol, regardless of the protocol in the viewer request.

If you specify Match Viewer, CloudFront forwards requests to the origin server using the protocol in the viewer request. Note that CloudFront caches the object only once even if viewers make requests using both HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

For information about how to update a distribution using the CloudFront console, see Updating a distribution. For information about how to update a distribution using the CloudFront API, go to UpdateDistribution in the Amazon CloudFront API Reference.

Query strings

You can configure whether CloudFront forwards query string parameters to your origin. For more information, see Caching content based on query string parameters.

Origin connection timeout and attempts

Origin connection timeout is the number of seconds that CloudFront waits when trying to establish a connection to the origin.

Origin connection attempts is the number of times that CloudFront attempts to connect to the origin.

Together, these settings determine how long CloudFront tries to connect to the origin before failing over to the secondary origin (in the case of an origin group) or returning an error response to the viewer. By default, CloudFront waits as long as 30 seconds (3 attempts of 10 seconds each) before attempting to connect to the secondary origin or returning an error response. You can reduce this time by specifying a shorter connection timeout, fewer attempts, or both.

For more information, see Controlling origin timeouts and attempts.

Origin response timeout

The origin response timeout, also known as the origin read timeout or origin request timeout, applies to both of the following:

CloudFront behavior depends on the HTTP method of the viewer request:

For more information, including how to configure the origin response timeout, see Response timeout (custom origins only).

Simultaneous requests for the same object (request collapsing)

When a CloudFront edge location receives a request for an object and the object isn't in the cache or the cached object is expired, CloudFront immediately sends the request to the origin. However, if there are simultaneous requests for the same object—that is, if additional requests for the same object (with the same cache key) arrive at the edge location before CloudFront receives the response to the first request—CloudFront pauses before forwarding the additional requests to the origin. This brief pause helps to reduce the load on the origin. CloudFront sends the response from the original request to all the requests that it received while it was paused. This is called request collapsing. In CloudFront logs, the first request is identified as a Miss in the x-edge-result-type field, and the collapsed requests are identified as a Hit. For more information about CloudFront logs, see CloudFront and edge function logging.

CloudFront only collapses requests that share a cache key. If the additional requests do not share the same cache key because, for example, you configured CloudFront to cache based on request headers or cookies or query strings, CloudFront forwards all the requests with a unique cache key to your origin.

If you would like to prevent all request collapsing, you can use the managed cache policy CachingDisabled, which also prevents caching. For more information, see Using the managed cache policies.

If you would like to prevent request collapsing for specific objects, you can set the minimum TTL for the cache behavior to 0 and configure the origin to send Cache-Control: private, Cache-Control: no-store, Cache-Control: no-cache, Cache-Control: max-age=0, or Cache-Control: s-maxage=0. These configurations will increase the load on your origin and introduce additional latency for the simultaneous requests that are paused while CloudFront waits for the response to the first request.

User-Agent header

If you want CloudFront to cache different versions of your objects based on the device that a user is using to view your content, we recommend that you configure CloudFront to forward one or more of the following headers to your custom origin:

Based on the value of the User-Agent header, CloudFront sets the value of these headers to true or false before forwarding the request to your origin. If a device falls into more than one category, more than one value might be true. For example, for some tablet devices, CloudFront might set both CloudFront-Is-Mobile-Viewer and CloudFront-Is-Tablet-Viewer to true. For more information about configuring CloudFront to cache based on request headers, see Caching content based on request headers.

You can configure CloudFront to cache objects based on values in the User-Agent header, but we don't recommend it. The User-Agent header has many possible values, and caching based on those values would cause CloudFront to forward significantly more requests to your origin.

If you do not configure CloudFront to cache objects based on values in the User-Agent header, CloudFront adds a User-Agent header with the following value before it forwards a request to your origin:

User-Agent = Amazon CloudFront

CloudFront adds this header regardless of whether the request from the viewer includes a User-Agent header. If the request from the viewer includes a User-Agent header, CloudFront removes it.

How CloudFront processes responses from your custom origin

This topic contains information about how CloudFront processes responses from your custom origin.

100 Continue responses

Your origin cannot send more than one 100-Continue response to CloudFront. After the first 100-Continue response, CloudFront expects an HTTP 200 OK response. If your origin sends another 100-Continue response after the first one, CloudFront will return an error.

Caching

Canceled requests

If an object is not in the edge cache, and if a viewer terminates a session (for example, closes a browser) after CloudFront gets the object from your origin but before it can deliver the requested object, CloudFront does not cache the object in the edge location.

Content negotiation

If your origin returns Vary:* in the response, and if the value of Minimum TTL for the corresponding cache behavior is 0, CloudFront caches the object but still forwards every subsequent request for the object to the origin to confirm that the cache contains the latest version of the object. CloudFront doesn't include any conditional headers, such as If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since. As a result, your origin returns the object to CloudFront in response to every request.

If your origin returns Vary:* in the response, and if the value of Minimum TTL for the corresponding cache behavior is any other value, CloudFront processes the Vary header as described in HTTP response headers that CloudFront removes or replaces.

Cookies

If you enable cookies for a cache behavior, and if the origin returns cookies with an object, CloudFront caches both the object and the cookies. Note that this reduces cacheability for an object. For more information, see Caching content based on cookies.

Dropped TCP connections

If the TCP connection between CloudFront and your origin drops while your origin is returning an object to CloudFront, CloudFront behavior depends on whether your origin included a Content-Length header in the response:

We recommend that you configure your HTTP server to add a Content-Length header to prevent CloudFront from caching partial objects.

HTTP response headers that CloudFront removes or replaces

CloudFront removes or updates the following header fields before forwarding the response from your origin to the viewer:

Maximum cacheable file size

The maximum size of a response body that CloudFront saves in its cache is 50 GB. This includes chunked transfer responses that don't specify the Content-Length header value.

You can use CloudFront to cache an object that is larger than this size by using range requests to request the objects in parts that are each 50 GB or smaller. CloudFront caches these parts because each of them is 50 GB or smaller. After the viewer retrieves all the parts of the object, it can reconstruct the original, larger object. For more information, see Use range requests to cache large objects.

Origin unavailable

If your origin server is unavailable and CloudFront gets a request for an object that is in the edge cache but that has expired (for example, because the period of time specified in the Cache-Control max-age directive has passed), CloudFront either serves the expired version of the object or serves a custom error page. For more information about CloudFront behavior when you've configured custom error pages, see How CloudFront processes errors when you have configured custom error pages.

In some cases, an object that is seldom requested is evicted and is no longer available in the edge cache. CloudFront can't serve an object that has been evicted.

Redirects

If you change the location of an object on the origin server, you can configure your web server to redirect requests to the new location. After you configure the redirect, the first time a viewer submits a request for the object, CloudFront Front sends the request to the origin, and the origin responds with a redirect (for example, 302 Moved Temporarily). CloudFront caches the redirect and returns it to the viewer. CloudFront does not follow the redirect.

You can configure your web server to redirect requests to one of the following locations:

Transfer-Encoding header

CloudFront supports only the chunked value of the Transfer-Encoding header. If your origin returns Transfer-Encoding: chunked, CloudFront returns the object to the client as the object is received at the edge location, and caches the object in chunked format for subsequent requests.

If the viewer makes a Range GET request and the origin returns Transfer-Encoding: chunked, CloudFront returns the entire object to the viewer instead of the requested range.

We recommend that you use chunked encoding if the content length of your response cannot be predetermined. For more information, see Dropped TCP connections.