Friday, September 19, 2008

Amazon S3 as a CDN?

It is coming... Amazon announced today that they are currently working with a small group of private beta customers on a edge network solution that will allow users of S3 to deliver the content to their users with low latency and high speed making use of what they call a "global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location". It is well known that they are currently serving their content from data centers in Washington DC, Seattle, and in the EU. I am wondering where their other locations are to make up the global network. That will be interesting to see. We are currently serving customers around the globe and have seen good performance most of the time, even to our customers in Australia. I am hoping that this will make our service that much more effective. The press statements talks about using public buckets for the service. I am hoping that this will also be available for private buckets as well!  If Amazon can keep the costs way down, they will really start to disrupt the CDN market.  We are getting several vendors calling us from CDNs and the prices all seem to go lower with each call.  Let's see what this does.