Improving Rest API Performance Using Cloudfront

So far all good, but how to configure Cloudfront to achieve such results? Below are the steps which can help anyone to configure Cloudfront with existing APIs.

Create Cloudfront Distribution:

1. In the CloudFront console, choose to Create Distribution.
2. On the first page of the Create Distribution Wizard, in the Web section, choose to Get Started.
3. For Origin Domain Name, enter your API URL, which is nothing but your current API URL(or base url e.g api.xxxx.com/search)
4. In Origin Path, keep as it is.
5. For Origin Protocol Policy, choose HTTPS Only.
   Note: API Gateway does not support unencrypted (HTTP) endpoints. For more information, see Amazon API Gateway FAQs.
6. To forward custom headers to your origin, enter one or more custom headers for Origin Custom Headers.
   Note: There are several custom headers that CloudFront can’t forward to your origin.
7. Choose to Create Distribution.
8. Wait for your distribution to deploy. This might take about 30 minutes. When its Status appears as Deployed in the console, the distribution is ready.

Configure Caching Using Behaviours:

Assuming Cloudfront is deployed, it’s time to configure behaviors for caching. I am using the above example to configure two APIs /search/pcp and /search/allergy to cache the content based on our needs. Here are the steps for same –

1. Click on CF distribution
2. Go to Behaviour Tab and click on Create Behaviour
3. Enter path pattern – in my case of pcp API it was /search/pcp
4. I will skip other settings which are self-explanatory, lets move to the main settings, select customize from Object Caching section, enter minimum TTL as 0, maximum and default value 31536000(this is max)
5. Under Query string forwarding and caching select the option Forward all, cache based on whitelist, in text box enter all your query parameters which you want to be cached(meaning when these changes backend API response changes), in my case, it was Keyword, Limit, Page, PracticeId and Zipcode, enter one in each line
6. Save the behavior

Once the distribution is ready, you can copy the Cloudfront URL and hit the API. Note down the response time. Now hit the same API again and compare the response time. You will see a big difference in the response time which means caching is working. Follow the above steps for adding multiple behaviors.

Challenges:

• Handling Selecting Caching

While implementing one of the challenges was that we needed to cache the response only when certain request parameter value is available. In our case, our backend was sometimes hitting our own database or hitting third party depending on request parameter value. Whenever we are hitting third-party API we don’t want to cache the result. We have handled this using max-age=1 parameter in API response, so whenever Cloudfront finds max-age=1 it caches for 1 second and overrides default settings. Now backend has control on what to cache and when.

• Automating Cache Updates

One of the requirements was to update the cache whenever the backend database is updated, so we wrote the AWS Lambda function to invalidate specific cache entries using Cloudfront invalidate API. We exposed this lambda function using AWS API gateway so that our backend can call the API and invalidate the specific cache entries based on which DB values are updated. I will cover this in our upcoming blogs.

Conclusion:

The new architecture turned the response time down to less than half of the original resulting in faster responses which in turn made the end-user delighted. All this was done without having to change any aspects of the core application or any downtime for the application.

In the end, the customer was happy to see savings for a time as well as cost.