Amazon Officially Launches Content Delivery Network
A few weeks ago, Amazon announced they would soon have a content delivery network that worked with S3 to deliver content, despite the fact that a ton of people were already using S3 for content delivery (including me).
Today, they launched their CloudFront delivery network. It’s a full blown content delivery network that will serve your content from across the country (and world). Similar to their other offerings, you only pay for what you use.
This is interesting because it makes content delivery now a commodity instead of an expensive proposition. We all want to get our content, especially videos, to our customers (see: perspective students) as quickly as possible. For some smaller schools, we don’t have the budget to sign up with one of the large content delivery networks.
Here’s a bit from the CloudFront website:
Amazon CloudFront has a simple, web services interface that lets you get started in minutes. In Amazon CloudFront, your objects are organized into distributions. A distribution specifies the location of the original version of your objects. A distribution has a unique CloudFront.net domain name (e.g. abc123.cloudfront.net) that you can use to reference your objects through the network of edge locations. If you wish, you can also map your own domain name (e.g. images.example.com) to your distribution.
Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your content close to end users, lowering latency when they download your objects. The service also gives you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.
Prices are pretty similar to S3, with US and EU locations costing $0.17 per GB transfer for the first 10TB. Hong Kong and Japan servers have slightly higher prices.
You can learn more about CloudFront at the AWS blog. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has more here, as does RightScale.
I’m going to try it out and I’ll report back.
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