What service would be beneficial for reducing latency on image downloads for a website serving global customers?

Amazon CloudFront is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) service that plays a crucial role in reducing latency for content delivery, particularly for static assets like images. By caching copies of your images in multiple edge locations around the world, CloudFront ensures that when a user requests an image, it is delivered from the nearest location rather than from the origin server. This proximity significantly reduces the time it takes to transfer data, resulting in faster loading times for users regardless of their geographic location.

CloudFront also optimizes the delivery of content by utilizing various performance features, such as dynamic content compression, HTTP/2 support, and intelligent routing of requests. These capabilities together improve the overall user experience by ensuring that images are delivered quickly and efficiently.

While services like Amazon S3 can store images and Amazon EC2 can host applications, they don't inherently include the optimizations provided by a CDN. Amazon Route 53 is primarily a DNS service that helps route users to the nearest data center but does not directly speed up the transfer of images like CloudFront does. Hence, using CloudFront is the most effective way to improve the latency of image downloads for a global audience.