Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Amazon CDN CloudFront

That was fast!  It was just a couple of months ago that Amazon told us that they were working on a CDN.  Yesterday they took another step and told the world that it has arrived.  The new service is called CloudFront and it works in conjunction with S3.  To get started, you simply need to have content that you have placed into a publicly accessible bucket on S3 and a couple of API calls later, you have content that accessible from the cloud in CDN style.  Your S3 content is served from the closest location to the requester and is stored there for a period of time so that subsequent calls can be served quickly from that location.  The great thing is that it is not limited to the Seattle or DC locations for serving the content.  There are many other datacenters across the US (and the world) that are capable of serving the content helping to ensure speedy access.  I can only imagine that this will have other CDN providers very nervous.  They are already dropping their prices dramatically and this will squeeze them even further.

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