AWS CloudFront is a content distribution service offered by AWS to serve low latency content with high data speed. In CloudFront, the content is organized into distributions and any request to the distribution is automatically served from the nearest edge locations. There are two types of distributions with CloudFront: (1) Download Distribution and (2) Streaming Distribution. The CloudFront distribution cannot be deleted if it is enabled. It is required to first disable the distribution before deleting. During the distribution creation stage, the CloudFront distribution will be in “In Progress” state (Creation in progress state) and the user cannot delete the distribution during that state. When a distribution is deleted, it will take some time (10-15 Minutes) to cascade all the changes to the CloudFront database.

The present guide demonstrates how to disable and delete the existing CloudFront download distribution.

1. Go to the AWS console through http://aws.amazon.com/console. Click on CloudFront.

2. The CloudFront console lists all the available distributions. It displays all the enabled as well as the disabled distributions. It lists the domain name of each distribution as well as the distribution type (streaming / download). Click the icon [i] of any distribution marked in the image or select one of the distributions.

3. Click on the “Disable” button to disable the distribution first.

4. AWS will ask for the confirmation before deleting the distribution. Click on “Yes, Disable”.

5. The process for disabling the distribution will now start. The process may take about 15 minutes to complete. Click on the “Close” button to close the dialogue.

6. CloudFront can serve content from a distribution only if it is enabled. Once disabled, CloudFront will not accept the end user requests for the content from that distribution.

7. The distribution can be deleted only when it is disabled. Select the distribution disabled in step#5 and click on the “Delete” button.

8. AWS will confirm before deleting the distribution. Click on “Yes, Delete”.

9. The distribution will now be deleted.

Keywords: Amazon Web Services, AWS, Amazon AWS Console, AWS S3, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudFront, CloudFront, AWS EC2, AWS ELB, CDN, Content Delivery Network