Amazon CloudFront now supports additional log formats and destinations for access logs

Posted on: Nov 20, 2024

Amazon CloudFront announces enhancements to its standard access logging capabilities, providing customers with new log configuration and delivery options. Customers can now deliver CloudFront access logs directly to two new destinations: Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon Data Firehose. Customers can select from an expanded list of log output formats, including JSON and Apache Parquet (for logs delivered to S3). Additionally, they can directly enable automatic partitioning of logs delivered to S3, select specific log fields, and set the order in which they are included in the logs.

Until today, customers had to write custom logic to partition logs, convert log formats, or deliver logs to CloudWatch Logs or Data Firehose. The new logging capabilities provide native log configurations, eliminating the need for custom log processing. For example, customers can now directly enable features like Apache Parquet format for CloudFront logs delivered to S3 to improve query performance when using services like Amazon Athena and AWS Glue.

Additionally, customers enabling access log delivery to CloudWatch Logs will receive 750 bytes of logs free for each CloudFront request. Standard access log delivery to Amazon S3 remains free. Please refer to the 'Additional Features' section of the CloudFront pricing page for more details.

Customers can now enable CloudFront standard logs to S3, CloudWatch Logs and Data Firehose through the CloudFront console or APIs. CloudFormation support will be coming soon. For detailed information about the new access log features, please refer to the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.