It was only a matter of time before Amazon would decide to release a Content Delivery Network, and according to the company in an official statement released today, it has done just that.
Designed to complement its S3 storage service and EC2 web services, the CDN will be available later this year and will provide users with a high performance method of distributing content to end users. Amazon claims it will have low latency and high data transfer rates when users access the content and it will be specifically designed (in the beginning at least) for “developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections.”
Although the CDN space is crowded with similar services from Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks, Amazon thinks it knows how to be successful in the space. And one of the key components of its plan is to undercut others on price and make it much easier to buy CDN services.
According to Amazon, it will charge customers based on usage instead of the common practice of charging through long-term contracts, but it would not discuss pricing at this time.
Amazon getting into the CDN business seems like the ideal move for a company that’s trying to provide storage and on-demand computing services already. And considering its size makes it easier for it to adapt its business model to satisfy smaller businesses and those that are less likely to want to enter into long-term agreements, Amazon could quite easily push its competitors aside and cement itself as the leader in the market.
And with a video streaming and distribution service already in place, Amazon is quickly becoming a CDN for itself, so it may know a thing or two about providing a robust service to its customers when its CDN becomes available later this year.
This is a good start for them to dip into CDN, especially with their other webservices. We love using them.
Fantastic news, however pricing remains to be seen. Lets hope they keep it reasonable.
Great idea. One of the biggest hurdles for a small company to use a cdn is cost; so having it based on a cost per usage basis would be killer.
is amazon is a online retails or a hosting / development company??
both.
I’m surprised they didn’t get into this earlier
Yeah for sure. Definately a right move!
Great move for Amazon S3 users !
This is great news! I can see this opening the doors for lots of companies’ projects where AKAMAI may have been overkill…..and overpriced.
Looking forward to it!
How is S3 not really a CDN? Is it entirely centralized if you’re serving files up from your S3 account, as opposed to distributed like a CDN?
A CDN would ideally replicate your content across continents and countries and have agressive peering with local ISPs. S3 doesnt do that as yet.
Will Amazon Unbox cease using Limelight and start using their own CDN?
Following @Bob’s comment… Kinda seems like S3 is like a CDN minus the edge caching and reliability. I recently looked at the options for scaling a site with Amazon’s services. Most of the folks I chatted with agree that the EC2/S3 are great for offline and non-critical features, but expect them to disappear for hours/days with no warning.
This effort will fail unless Amazon commits to a highly available service. In doing so, I suspect they’ll need to improve the uptime/reliability of all their cloud services.
CG
The price for Amazon S3 is going to be much much better then the other competitors. Also they would not stress on working with high volume customers only either…
Finally, I just wasted 450 dollars for 3 months with Akamai reseller and we hardly used the bandwidth as the site did not catch the anticipated traffic. Amazon’s pay-as-go policy is a money saver for lot of small startups like us.
The article says that “And with a video streaming and distribution service already in place, Amazon is quickly becoming a CDN for itself.”" Amazon does not have a video streaming service in place. Amazon has a video content offering in place, that happens to use streaming, and Amazon does not deliver it themselves, it uses Limelight Networks to deliver that content.
Smartsheet is now delivering much of its static application content via CloudFront (Amazon’s CDN service). We had looked at other CDN offerings last year, but couldn’t justify it based on the price points and contract terms. Benchmarking with our U.S. and international customers has shown the performance of CloudFront easily on par with what we had been promised by the higher priced players last year. To view our AWS CDN deployment template click the Smartsheet screenshot in the CloudFront Amazon Web Services Blog post: http://preview....yurl.com/5zwqtt