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.

Related Links:

Amazon CloudFront

AWS Developer weblog

Rightscale

TechCrunch

Getting Started Guide

Technical Documentation

How to Setup Amazon S3 with CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network

Python interface for AWS – boto

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Amazon AWS

Today is a big day for Amazon EC2- now production ready with SLA, windows support and 4 new capabilities.

All these long awaited features are set to go live today.Which in effect can be summarized as

• Amazon EC2 is no more experimental with the beta tag gone.
• EC2 joins S3 in having a SLA.
• Beta level Microsoft Windows is a new option.
• Microsoft SQL Server is another option.
• Plans for AWS management console.
• Plans for load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

How does all this affect the existing customers and lure new customers?

Production ready – Amazon is now in a better shape to take on traditional hosts now that its production ready. Having used EC2 for the past few months and not having to reboot any of my instances, this makes me feel that I can now run a full production house in the cloud.

SLA – The service level agreement of 99.95% minimum uptime is a great value addition. This means that a downtime of 36 hours per month is permissible. Even though this may be unaccepatable for many sites to run production machines on EC2, its a start.

This turns out to be 0.36 hours per month which is very good. I have hosted around 20 servers till now for the past several months in the could and all of them have had 100% uptime. The only downside has been that I had to migrate around 5 instances once due to “degraded hardware” of which I was notified by the EC2 team. This by itself is excellent support!

Windows Support – All the developers itching to get their hands on Windows in the cloud rejoice! The beta support of Microsoft Windows provides developers with access to the instance using the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop client. The AMI for both 32 bit and 64 bit are available with the pricing starting at $0.125 per hour.

Microsoft SQL Server – Windows as well as MS SQL now provides a complete platform for Windows based computing technologies.

The Interesting part is that the things which are now in the pipeline include AWS management console, load balancing, auto scale, monitoring services, all of which is essentially RightScale‘s business.

A complete circle

As Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels hints in his blog about “Using the Cloud to build highly-efficient systems” about the cost efficiency of these services in view of the current US economic crisis, it sure is a big day for cloud computing and IaaS.

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