🐾Lambda@Edge vs. CloudFront Functions🐾

🤓 When thinking about edge computing for URL redirects and HTTP header manipulation, which service comes to mind first? Surprisingly, I often hear Lambda@Edge mentioned more than CloudFront Functions, despite the latter being a powerful tool that, in my experience, covers around 70% of common use cases.

TL;DR

Consider using CloudFront Functions for high-volume, simple operations (like URL normalization and basic header manipulation) while utilizing Lambda@Edge for more complex tasks that truly need the additional capabilities. When in doubt, start with CloudFront Functions and migrate to Lambda@Edge only when you hit a limitation.

CloudFront Functions

CloudFront Functions are ideal for simple, fast request/response manipulations using JavaScript. They are optimized for high-performance, low-latency tasks and deploy almost instantly. These functions are directly attached to CloudFront distributions.

Common use cases include:

✅ URL rewrites and redirects
✅ Request header manipulation
✅ Cache key normalization
✅ HTTP response header modification
✅ Simple authentication and authorization

Pricing: 50M requests × $0.10 per 1M = $5.00 per month

Lambda@Edge

Lambda@Edge provides significantly more flexibility and computing power but comes with higher costs and slightly increased latency. Cold starts typically range from 50–100ms, which may affect performance for latency-sensitive applications. Lambda@Edge functions must be created in the us-east-1 region and then associated with a CloudFront behavior. Deployments usually take 5–8 minutes to propagate globally. Available runtime is Node.js and Python.

Best suited for:

✅ Complex logic requiring more CPU or memory
✅ Third-party library integration
✅ Access to request bodies (e.g., form processing)
✅ Operations requiring external API calls
✅ Image manipulation
✅ Longer execution time

Pricing: 50M requests × $0.60 per 1M = $30.00 per month*
*Additional Lambda compute costs apply based on duration

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Thank you for reading, let’s chat 💬

💬 Have you ever used CloudFront Functions?
💬 Would you like to try using CloudFront Functions over Lambda@Edge?
💬 Any questions that you want me to cover in more detail?

I love hearing from readers 🫶🏻 Please feel free to drop comments, questions, and opinions below👇🏻