What is an Amazon CloudFront distribution?

An Amazon CloudFront distribution is fundamentally a content delivery mechanism that facilitates the propagation of your web content closer to users around the globe, thereby enhancing access speed and performance. When considering the context of content delivery webs, a distribution acts as a link between the user requests and the original content source—this is often a website, application, or an Amazon S3 bucket.

The purpose of directing DNS to your source content aligns perfectly with how CloudFront operates: it routes incoming requests to the nearest edge location based on latency, ensuring that the content is delivered with minimal delay. This means that CloudFront effectively manages how DNS resolves to the optimized edge server that can provide the content most efficiently, thus reducing load times and improving user experience.

In comparison, other choices focus on aspects unrelated to content delivery. Managing EC2 instances pertains to compute services rather than the distribution of content. Data encryption is concerned with security measures, while managing IAM roles relates to permissions and authentication in AWS. Therefore, the role of a CloudFront distribution is distinctly centered on enhancing content delivery via optimized routing patterns through DNS.