Today, I’m happy to announce the general availability of Amazon CloudFront SaaS Manager, a new feature that helps software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, web development platform providers, and companies with multiple brands and websites efficiently manage delivery across multiple domains. Customers already use CloudFront to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds. CloudFront SaaS Manager addresses a critical challenge these organizations face: managing tenant websites at scale, each requiring TLS certificates, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, and performance monitoring.

With CloudFront Saas Manager, web development platform providers and enterprise SaaS providers who manage a large number of domains will use simple APIs and reusable configurations that use CloudFront edge locations worldwide, AWS WAF, and AWS Certificate Manager. CloudFront SaaS Manager can dramatically reduce operational complexity while providing high-performance content delivery and enterprise-grade security for every customer domain.

How it works
In CloudFront, you can use multi-tenant SaaS deployments, a strategy where a single CloudFront distribution serves content for multiple distinct tenants (users or organizations). CloudFront SaaS Manager uses a new template-based distribution model called a multi-tenant distribution to serve content across multiple domains while sharing configuration and infrastructure. However, if supporting single websites or application, a standard distribution would be better or recommended.

A template distribution defines the base configuration that will be used across domains such as origin configurations, cache behaviors, and security settings. Each template distribution has a distribution tenant to represent domain-specific origin paths or origin domain names including web access control list (ACL) overrides and custom TLS certificates.

Optionally, multiple distribution tenants can use the same connection group that provides the CloudFront routing endpoint that serves content to viewers. DNS records point to the CloudFront endpoint of the connection group using a Canonical Name Record (CNAME).

To learn more, visit Understand how multi-tenant distributions work in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

CloudFront SaaS Manager in action
I’d like to give you an example to help you understand the capabilities of CloudFront SaaS Manager. You have a company called MyStore, a popular e-commerce platform that helps your customer easily set up and manage an online store. MyStore’s tenants already enjoy outstanding customer service, security, reliability, and ease-of-use with little setup required to get a store up and running, resulting in 99.95 percent uptime for the last 12 months.

Customers of MyStore are unevenly distributed across three different pricing tiers: Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and each customer is assigned a persistent mystore.app subdomain. You can apply these tiers to different customer segments, customized settings, and operational Regions. For example, you can add AWS WAF service in the Gold tier as an advanced feature. In this example, MyStore has decided not to maintain their own web servers to handle TLS connections and security for a growing number of applications hosted on their platform. They are evaluating CloudFront to see if that will help them reduce operational overhead.

Let’s find how as MyStore you configure your customer’s websites distributed in multiple tiers with the CloudFront SaaS Manager. To get started, you can create a multi-tenant distribution that acts as a template corresponding to each of the three pricing tiers the MyStore offers: Bronze, Sliver, and Gold shown in Multi-tenant distribution under the SaaS menu on the Amazon CloudFront console.

To create a multi-tenant distribution, choose Create distribution and select Multi-tenant architecture if you have multiple websites or applications that will share the same configuration. Follow the steps to provide basic details such as a name for your distribution, tags, and wildcard certificate, specify origin type and location for your content such as a website or app, and enable security protections with AWS WAF web ACL feature.

When the multi-tenant distribution is created successfully, you can create a distribution tenant by choosing Create tenant in the Distribution tenants menu in the left navigation pane. You can create a distribution tenant to add your active customer to be associated with the Bronze tier.

Each tenant can be associated with up to one multi-tenant distribution. You can add one or more domains of your customers to a distribution tenant and assign custom parameter values such as origin domains and origin paths. A distribution tenant can inherit the TLS certificate and security configuration of its associated multi-tenant distribution. You can also attach a new certificate specifically for the tenant, or you can override the tenant security configuration.

When the distribution tenant is created successfully, you can finalize this step by updating a DNS record to route traffic to the domain in this distribution tenant and creating a CNAME pointed to the CloudFront application endpoint. To learn more, visit Create a distribution in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Now you can see all customers in each distribution tenant to associate multi-tenant distributions.

By increasing customers’ business needs, you can upgrade your customers from Bronze to Silver tiers by moving those distribution tenants to a proper multi-tenant distribution.

During the monthly maintenance process, we identify domains associated with inactive customer accounts that can be safely decommissioned. If you’ve decided to deprecate the Bronze tier and migrate all customers who are currently in the Bronze tier to the Silver tier, then you can delete a multi-tenant distribution to associate the Bronze tier. To learn more, visit Update a distribution or Distribution tenant customizations in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

By default, your AWS account has one connection group that handles all your CloudFront traffic. You can enable Connection group in the Settings menu in the left navigation pane to create additional connection groups, giving you more control over traffic management and tenant isolation.

To learn more, visit Create custom connection group in the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Now available
Amazon CloudFront SaaS Manager is available today. To learn about, visit CloudFront SaaS Manager product page and documentation page. To learn about SaaS on AWS, visit AWS SaaS Factory.

Give CloudFront SaaS Manager a try in the CloudFront console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon CloudFront or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Veliswa.
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