Automatic CloudFront Invalidation – Bynder Support

Bynder can automatically invalidate your CloudFront CDN URLs when you upload a new version to an existing asset. No longer will you have to wait for its cache to expire. The assets you integrated externally using CloudFront will now always reflect the latest version. Are you making use of CloudFront and would you like to have your images invalidated automatically? Read more about this feature below.

Note

Automatic invalidation has been automatically set up for you portal if your portal was created after January 18th, 2022 and you use our default CloudFront CDN.

What is automatic invalidation?

CloudFront distributes your media and caches them on numerous servers around the world. The first time an image is requested, it will be retrieved from the main server. It will then be cached (temporarily copied) to the closets edge location of that user. The biggest advantage for you is that your visitors are automatically directed to the server of the nearest location, which serves them the cached asset. They no longer have to go all to way to the main server location to retrieve the file. This results in less waiting time and quicker page loads. Depending on the configuration of the CDN, the cache expires after a certain amount of time. Assets that are requested for the first time after the cache has expired, will need to be retrieved from the main server again. The default expiry time of our CDN offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is 24 hours.

When you upload a new version of an asset you want this change to be reflected immediately in all other locations where the asset is integrated via CloudFront URLs. This is where automatic invalidation comes in. The CloudFront URLs will still show the previous version of the asset until the cache has expired. Once a new version is uploaded our automatic invalidation mechanism ensures that the cached asset is removed from the CDN, so that upon the first new request the latest version will be served to the end users.

How can I make use of automatic invalidation?

To make use of this feature the following is required:

CloudFront CDN needs to be in place for your Bynder Portal. Read more about setting up a CloudFront for your portal here.
The invalidation feature only works with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that was set up via Bynder. If we set up CloudFront for you before, you're good to go.

Note

If you're making use of your own CDN the automatic invalidation cannot take place, because we need to have full access to the CDN in order to invalidate the URLs.

Limitations

The automatic invalidation does not work with focus point, which means that if you set a new focus point the CloudFront URLs will not be invalidated automatically. Once the cached URLs have expired the new focus point will be visible.
The automatic invalidation feature does not work with any other CDN than CloudFront offered by AWS. The CloudFront CDN for your portal needs to have been set up by Bynder, because we need to have full access to the CDN in order to invalidate the URLs.

Learn more