do we need to store the files and videos on aws cloudfront servers manually ?

When using AWS CloudFront for video delivery, you don't manually store videos on CloudFront servers. Instead, CloudFront works as a content delivery network (CDN) that caches content from your origin servers (such as Amazon S3 buckets or an HTTP server) at edge locations closer to your users to reduce latency and improve load times. Here's how it typically works:

Setting Up CloudFront for Video Delivery

1. Origin Server Setup: Your videos first need to be uploaded to an origin server, which is commonly an Amazon S3 bucket but can also be an EC2 instance, an Elastic Load Balancer, or any custom HTTP server that hosts your video content.

2. Create a CloudFront Distribution: You then create a CloudFront distribution and specify your origin server. During this process, you'll configure various settings, including cache behavior policies, geographic restrictions, SSL certificates, and more.

3. Access Through CloudFront URL: Once your CloudFront distribution is created and deployed, CloudFront assigns a domain name to your distribution (e.g., d1234.cloudfront.net). You use this domain to access your videos. For example, if your S3 bucket has a video named example.mp4, you would access it via http://d1234.cloudfront.net/example.mp4.

4. Caching at Edge Locations: When a user requests a video for the first time, CloudFront retrieves the video from your origin server and caches it at the edge location closest to the user. Subsequent requests for the same video by any user in the same region will be served directly from the cache at the edge location, significantly reducing latency.

5. Cache Invalidation and Update: If you update a video on your origin server, you can either wait for the cached version to expire based on the TTL (Time to Live) settings you've configured, or you can manually invalidate the cached file to force CloudFront to fetch the updated version from your origin server on the next request.

Key Points:

• No Manual Uploading to CloudFront: You don't upload content directly to CloudFront; CloudFront automatically caches content from your specified origin.
• Caching Strategy: It's important to define an effective caching strategy, including setting appropriate TTL values for your video content to balance between cache hit ratios and content freshness.
• Cost Considerations: While CloudFront can significantly improve your content delivery times, keep in mind that there are costs associated with data transfer out of AWS to the internet, as well as additional charges for CloudFront requests and cache invalidations.