Automatic CloudFront Invalidation

CloudFront is a service that distributes your media files and stores them on servers all over the world. When someone requests an image for the first time, it is retrieved from the main server and temporarily stored on the server closest to that user. This means that subsequent requests for the same image can be served from the nearest server, reducing waiting time and speeding up page loads. The cache of the image expires after a certain amount of time, depending on the CDN configuration. When the cache expires, the image needs to be retrieved from the main server again.

By default, the cache expiry time for our CDN provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) is 24 hours. When you upload a new version of an asset, you want it to be immediately reflected in all the locations where the asset is integrated via CloudFront URLs. This is where automatic invalidation comes in. Until the cache expires, the CloudFront URLs will still show the previous version of the asset. However, once a new version is uploaded, our automatic invalidation mechanism removes the cached asset from the CDN. This ensures that the latest version of the asset is served to end users upon the first new request.