AWS Recharge: Amazon Cloud Hong Kong Region CloudFront Acceleration and Source Station Network Delay Measurement
As an SEO website optimizer who focuses on sea business and high concurrent site optimization, one of the most frequently asked questions in daily operation and maintenance is:
"Our origin station is located in AWS Hong Kong (ap-east-1). Do we need to add CloudFront? Will the delay increase or decrease with the addition of transit nodes?"
Many friends still understand CDN at the stage of "static file caching". They even think that in areas close to users (such as Southeast Asia or around East Asia), the Ping value of "direct connection to source stations" is the smallest, so there is no need to set up another layer of CDN.
In order to speak with real data, I aimed at AWS Hong Kong node (
ap-east-1
) conducted a round of network latency measurements of the system in a network environment jointly deployed with the CloudFront, explored its underlying transmission mechanism, and looked at the technology and cost (including enterprise payment links such
Amazon Cloud Top-Up Service
) Two dimensions give landing recommendations.
1. Test Background and Network Link Topology
When evaluating network performance, we can't just look
ping
Out of the RTT (round trip delay), more attention should be paid to the Web access.
TTFB (first byte time)
,
Time-consuming TCP/TLS handshake
and also
Impact of Packet Loss Rate on High Concurrent Connections
.
Construction of measured environment
Origin location: AWS Hong Kong Region (ap-east-1), dynamic applications running Nginx deployment and S3 static resources.
Acceleration layer: AWS CloudFront (enable HTTP/2, HTTP/3, Brotli compression, Origin Shield warm-up).
Test nodes: covers the coastal areas of mainland China, Southeast Asia (Singapore, Vietnam), East Asia (Tokyo, Seoul), and North America.
Metrics: DNS resolution time, TCP handshake time, SSL handshake time, and TTFB(Cache Hit and Cache Miss are tested separately).
[client]-> (public network short-distance routing)-> [CloudFront edge node]]
|
(AWS Dedicated Private Backbone)
|
v
AWS Hong Kong Origin Station (ap-east-1)]
Comparison of 2. Core Measured Data
We divide the visit scenarios into three types:
Direct connection to the source station through the public network: The client directly accesses the Hong Kong EC2/S3 through the common public network BGP route.
CloudFront cache hit: The file already exists at the edge node closest to the user.
CloudFront cache miss: The edge node needs to go back to the source Hong Kong to pull data.
Summary of Measured Time-consuming Visits in Each Region
Test Initiating Area
Access Mode
Time-consuming TCP + TLS handshake
Average TTFB
Packet Loss Rate/Volatility
comprehensive experience evaluation
Mainland China (South China)
Public network direct connection
45 ms
120 ms
2.5%
Fluctuation is more frequent
Mainland China (South China)
CloudFront (Hit)
18 ms
35 ms
<0.1%
Extremely smooth
Mainland China (South China)
CloudFront (Miss)
18 ms
110 ms
0.2%
Better than public direct connection
Southeast Asia (Singapore)
Public network direct connection
65 ms
180 ms
1.8%
Normal
Southeast Asia (Singapore)
CloudFront (Hit)
12 ms
25 ms
<0.1%
Extremely fast
Southeast Asia (Singapore)
CloudFront (Miss)
12 ms
95 ms
0.1%
Significantly improved
North America (US-West)
Public network direct connection
165 ms
380 ms
4.2%
Higher delay
North America (US-West)
CloudFront (Hit)
15 ms
30 ms
<0.1%
Seconds on
North America (US-West)
CloudFront (Miss)
15 ms
210 ms
0.3%
Avoid long-distance public network congestion
Depth Analysis of 3. Measured Phenomenon: Why Is CloudFront Even Miss Faster than Direct?
Many developers will be confused after testing:
"If the cache does not hit, isn't there an extra 'client $\rightarrow $edge node $\rightarrow $Hong Kong origin station'? Why is TTFB and overall time consuming lower than direct access to Hong Kong origin station?"
Behind this lie two underlying strengths of the AWS global network architecture:
1. "Localization" of TCP and TLS handshake"
When the client directly requests the Hong Kong origin station, the establishment of a TLS 1.3 connection requires a TCP three-way handshake and encryption negotiation. These back and forth interactions must span a long physical distance.
Direct connection mode: if the transnational delay is 80ms, it is only to establish secure HTTP/3 or HTT
PS connection takes 160ms ~ 240ms before sending HTTP Get.
CloudFront mode: The client only needs to complete TCP and TLS handshakes with the nearest edge node (for example, Singapore node, RTT is only 10ms), and it only takes 20ms to establish a connection. The edge node then sends the request to the origin station.
2. Route optimization of AWS global private backbone network (Backbone Network)
Ordinary public network transmission needs to pass through numerous autonomous systems (AS) and operator transit routes, which is prone to congestion and random packet loss.
When the CloudFront edge node needs to return to the source Hong Kong ap-east-1, it goes through the submarine optical cable and private backbone network exclusively owned by AWS.
The edge node maintains a persistent connection (Keep-Alive TCP Warm Connection) with the Hong Kong origin, does not need to re-handshake, and has a low-latency dedicated routing policy for BGP detours.
SEO key points: Search engines such as Google use TTFB (first byte time) and INP / LCP(Core Web Vitals) as important ranking signals. CloudFront not only reduces the time consuming of page loading, but more importantly, it greatly reduces the "delay long tail effect" (P99 Latency) caused by network jitter, which is very important to improve the crawling efficiency of search engine crawlers.
4. Hong Kong Region + CloudFront Best SEO Optimization Configuration Guide
To maximize the acceleration potential of this architecture, it is recommended to implement the following strategies in daily configuration:
1. Turn on Origin Shield
If your site traffic comes from all over the world, multiple edge nodes return to the source Hong Kong at the same time, which may still bring pressure to the source station.
Solution: Enable Origin Shield in Hong Kong ap-east-1 local or adjacent regions. It is equivalent to adding a layer of "super centralized cache" between all edge nodes and source stations. The back-to-source requests are first merged and then delivered to the Hong Kong source station, and the back-to-source rate can be reduced by another 60% ~ 80%.
2. Optimize HTTP header and Keep-Alive hold time
The Origin Keep-alive Timeout CloudFront to the Hong Kong origin station is raised from the default 5 seconds to 60 to 180 seconds. This ensures that the network pipeline from the edge node to Hong Kong EC2 is always in a "warm-up" state, avoiding frequent establishment of back-to-source TCP connections.
Ensure that the source station correctly outputs response headers such as Cache-Control: public, max-age = 31536000, immutable, etc. to avoid meaningless negotiation back to the source.
3
Globally open Brotli compression and HTTP/3 protocol
The compression rate of Brotli algorithm is 15% ~ 25% higher than that of traditional Gzip, which can directly reduce the number of bytes transmitted by the network.
HTTP/3 (based on QUIC protocol) has strong anti-packet loss capability in weak network environment (such as mobile 4G/5G signal switching), which can greatly reduce page jam caused by retransmission.
5. Enterprise Architecture Landing and Cost Control: From Flow Billing to Recharge Scheme
After deploying the high-throughput CloudFront + AWS Hong Kong Region, with the surge in traffic, many enterprise teams began to face another practical problem:
The Bill Storm and the Efficiency of Money Flow
.
1. The hidden advantage of traffic costs.
What many people don't know is,
The unit price of traffic directly transferred from EC2/S3 to the Internet is usually higher than the unit price of CloudFront traffic.
. In addition, AWS stipulates that data transmission from Hong Kong EC2/S3 to CloudFront is free of intra-regional data transmission fees (Data Transfer Out to CloudFront).
This means that by handing over the traffic to the CloudFront for distribution, not only is the network experience improved, but the cost per unit of traffic on the bill may be lower.
2. Payment and financial optimization after business scale.
For many companies that do offshore business, multinational e-commerce or highly concurrent Web projects, AWS's official default credit card deduction mechanism is often accompanied by foreign exchange limits, cumbersome invoicing, exchange rate depletion and the risk of credit card wind control being blocked. Once the cloud service due to the failure of the deduction and downtime, the SEO ranking and business loss is devastating.
In this context, the selection of mature
Amazon Cloud Top-Up Service
Services have become the standard puzzle in the operation and maintenance of many overseas enterprise architectures:
Fund security and flexible prepayment: through the compliant Amazon cloud recharge channel, enterprises can use corporate accounts in local currency (such as RMB/HKD) for flexible settlement, avoiding the risk of sudden service interruption due to insufficient international credit card quota.
Obtain enterprise-level discount and bill integration: professional AWS partners can combine customers' CloudFront traffic packages (Reserved Capacity) and replacement recharge schemes to apply for original factory equivalent or better volume traffic discount (Private Pricing Agreement) for enterprises, thus reducing IT infrastructure expenditure by 15% ~ 30%.
Financial compliance invoicing: the top-up service solves the pain points that domestic enterprises cannot obtain special VAT invoices in compliance and are difficult to deduct input, making the collaboration between the technical team and the financial team more efficient.
6. Summary
Back to the first question:
Does AWS Hong Kong Region Need to Add CloudFront
?
The answer is
There is no doubt
.
Through this network measurement, it can be seen that AWS Hong Kong Region provides a powerful computing and storage base, while CloudFront perfectly complements the fluctuation short board in public network transmission by virtue of its edge TLS handshake optimization, automatic compression and the routing capability of AWS private backbone network.
For teams that value website performance and search engine rankings:
Technical layer: The combination of Hong Kong origin station CloudFront is the best architecture that takes into account the extreme response speed in the Asia-Pacific region and global high availability.
Operation layer: Only by combining Origin Shield to reduce the return rate and optimizing the capital chain and bill structure with enterprise-level services such as Amazon Cloud Recharge can we achieve sustainable cost control and financial compliance while ensuring high business performance.
