# Cloudfront and S3

> You don't have to use CloudFront in front of S3 (but it can help).

If all you care about is scalability, you can link people directly to the S3 URL instead of using CloudFront. S3 can scale to any capacity, so is great if that's all your care about. Additionally, updates are available quickly in S3, yet you have to wait for the TTL when using a CDN to see the change (although I believe you can set a 0s TTL in CloudFront now, so this point is probably moot).

If you need speed, or are handling very high bandwidth (10TB+), then you might want to use a CDN like CloudFront in front of S3. CloudFront can dramatically [speed up access](http://www.quora.com/What-are-typical-latencies-for-static-content-in-S3-vs-Cloudfront) for users around the globe, as it copies your content to edge locations. Depending on your use case, this can also work out slightly cheaper if you deal with very high bandwidth (10TB+) with lower request numbers, as it's about $0.010/GB cheaper for CloudFront bandwidth than S3 bandwidth once you get above 10TB, but the cost per request is slightly higher than if you were to access the files from S3 directly. Depending on your usage pattern, the savings from bandwidth could outweigh the extra cost per request. Since content is only fetched from S3 infrequently (and at a much lower rate than normal), your S3 cost would be much smaller than if you were serving content directly from S3. The [AWS documentation on CloudFront](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html) explains how you can use it with S3.