Are there any difference between amazon cloudfront and amazon s3 transfer acceleration?
TL;DR: CloudFront is for content delivery. S3 Transfer Acceleration is for faster transfers and higher throughput to S3 buckets (mainly uploads).
Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is an S3 feature that accelerates uploads to S3 buckets using AWS Edge locations - the same Edge locations as in AWS CloudFront service.
However, (a) creating a CloudFront distribution with an origin pointing to your S3 bucket and (b) enabling S3 Transfer acceleration for your bucket - are two different things serving two different purposes.
When you create a CloudFront distribution with an origin pointing to your S3 bucket, you enable caching on Edge locations. Consequent requests to the same objects will be served from the Edge cache which is faster for the end user and also reduces the load on your origin. CloudFront is primarily used as a content delivery service.
When you enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for your S3 bucket and use <bucket>.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com instead of the default S3 endpoint, the transfers are performed via the same Edge locations, but the network path is optimized for long-distance large-object uploads. Extra resources and optimizations are used to achieve higher throughput. No caching on Edge locations.
More inromation:
- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-storage-update-amazon-s3-transfer-acceleration-larger-snowballs-in-more-regions/
- http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/transfer-acceleration-examples.html
- https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/04/transfer-files-into-amazon-s3-up-to-300-percent-faster/
If you are interested in the difference between these two options pertaining to uploading content to S3 you may be interested in the following from Amazon's FAQ for S3:
Q. How should I choose between Transfer Acceleration and Amazon CloudFront’s PUT/POST? Transfer Acceleration optimizes the TCP protocol and adds additional intelligence between the client and the S3 bucket, making Transfer Acceleration a better choice if a higher throughput is desired. If you have objects that are smaller than 1GB or if the data set is less than 1GB in size, you should consider using Amazon CloudFront's PUT/POST commands for optimal performance.
As the FAQ answer states, transfer acceleration should be used if you need higher throughput.