Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that caches copies of your content at edge locations around the world. This helps improve performance by serving content from the edge nearest to the user. However, when the content in Amazon S3 (your origin) is updated, those updates may not immediately reflect on the website if they are cached at the CloudFront edge locations.
The issue described in the question suggests that the CI/CD pipeline is functioning correctly, and updates are being deployed to S3. However, since CloudFront caches this content, the edge locations may still be serving outdated content, causing the updates to not be reflected on the website.
To resolve this issue, you need to invalidate the CloudFront cache. By invalidating the cache, CloudFront will remove the outdated content and retrieve the latest version from the S3 origin.
AWS documentation on this process:
CloudFront cache invalidation allows you to clear items from the cache so that CloudFront retrieves the latest version from the origin. You can create invalidation requests via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs.
AWS CloudFront Documentation
Why the other options are incorrect:
A. Add an Application Load Balancer: ALBs are used to distribute incoming application traffic and are not relevant to caching or serving content from CloudFront.
B. Add Amazon ElastiCache for Redis or Memcached: This would help in caching database queries but has no relation to static website content hosted on CloudFront and S3.
D. Use AWS Certificate Manager (ACM): ACM is used for managing SSL/TLS certificates and is unrelated to the issue of content not being updated on CloudFront.
