Amazon launches its CDN – CloudFront

Sukumar — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:36:26 +0000

Another remarkable day for Amazon Web Services as Werner Vogels, CTO – Amazon.com, launched the much anticipated CDN solution to the public after two months of announcement.

Amazon AWS

Amazon CloudFront

Aptly named Amazon CloudFront, the beta version of the service went live today with a pay-as-you-go pricing model with 14 edge locations across three continents.

United States

Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO

Europe

Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London

Asia

Hong Kong; Tokyo

Amazon CloudFront edge locations

A traditionally expensive option for websites to provide their users with data at a lower latency and increased delivery speed, CDNs can now be deployed by even small players opening up a new market area.

To get started with CloudFront

1. Register for Amazon CloudFront

2. Create a publicly readable bucket and host you most popular data in it.

3. Create a new CloudFront distribution using a simple post call. (Documentation)

4. Distribute you content using the publicly given CloudFront sub domain (format – abc123.cloudfront.net)

or through your own sub domain using a CNAME. (upto 10 CNAMEs per distribution is allowed).

The data transfer rate starts $0.17 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out for American and European edges, increasing for Hong Kong and Japan edges with the cost being $0.210 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out and $0.220 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out respectively. The cost of transferring data from the user’s S3 bucket to the edge is also metered and priced same as S3.

Addition of CloudFront to AWS adds another feather in Amazon’s cap and moves the web one step closer to running a website completely on the cloud. Perhaps one could now expect Amazon AWS to also provide tailor made solutions such as MySQL, Memcached, web servers, applications servers which can scale indefinately but still fit in the traditional model, which currently RightScale provides.

Though many herald this move as a blow to existing CDNs such as Akamai and Limelight, there are a few who reason the extent to which CloudFront will affect their business and their CDN pricing.

thinkAPI» Content Delivery Network

Amazon launches its CDN – CloudFront