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CloudFront's Flat-Rate Pricing Plans Are Now Manageable via API and IaC

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#devops#infrastructure

Hi, I'm Shii-chan!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

Today's update should make IaC fans and automation lovers smile, so let me share it!

What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon CloudFront's flat-rate pricing plans can now be subscribed to and managed programmatically using the AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, CloudFormation, CDK, or the new PricingPlanManager API.

CloudFront's flat-rate plans bundle global content delivery along with WAF, DDoS protection, DNS, logging, and edge compute, all for one fixed monthly price. Even if you get a traffic spike or an attack, there are no usage-based overage charges.

The story so far

Until now, subscribing to a flat-rate pricing plan could only be done through the console. So even if you were building and managing your distributions entirely through the API or IaC tools like CloudFormation or CDK, the pricing plan part still required a manual trip into the console. It was a manual seam in an otherwise automated pipeline.

What changes

That seam is now gone.

  • You can subscribe, upgrade, downgrade, and cancel plans programmatically through the API or IaC tools
  • You can define pricing plans alongside your distributions in CloudFormation or CDK
  • No more manual console steps, making it easier to manage your infrastructure entirely as code

For infrastructure teams managing CloudFront as code, or anyone building agent-driven workflows that provision resources automatically, this is a quiet but genuinely useful improvement.

Dive Deep

Paid plans come with a safeguard for programmatic use.

  • Paid plans use a two-phase activation flow: you first create the plan, and billing only starts once you approve it
  • This two-phase flow means automated workflows or agents can create plans without risking unintended billing commitments
  • Free plans activate immediately and don't require approval

A getting-started guide for the PricingPlanManager API is available. There are no additional fees for using the API to manage flat-rate pricing plans.

Wrap-up

  • CloudFront's flat-rate pricing plans can now be managed via CLI, SDKs, CloudFormation, CDK, and the PricingPlanManager API
  • Subscribing, upgrading, downgrading, and canceling, previously console-only, can now be automated
  • Paid plans use a create-then-approve two-phase flow to prevent unintended billing
  • Free plans activate immediately with no approval needed, and there's no extra charge for using the API

If you're an infrastructure or DevOps engineer who wants to manage CloudFront entirely through IaC and pipelines, this is an update you've been waiting for.

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