Amazon made good on their promise to launch a content delivery network by the end of the year this morning with the release of CloudFront.
Pricing in the U.S. and Europe starts at $.17/GB transferred, ranging down to $.09/GB for transfers over 150 TB/month. They’re somewhat higher in Asia. This isn’t the lowest CDN pricing out there by far, but it’s pay for usage only, giving smaller players a price advantage over large competitors like Akamai. And the service promises to work seamlessly with Amazon S3 and their other web services.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has more.
That’s awesome. I’ve been looking forward to Amazon launching that for a while although the price seems a little higher then I initially anticipated.
Peter Epstein
http://www.thewebwar.com
Probably It ’s time for many of the CDNs (whose pricing models are opaque) to be transparent and competitive. Some of them may have tough times to sustain in course of time…
CDN pricing models aren’t opaque if you are a customer or potential customer, or a rival CDN. We’ve renegotiated 3 times in the past 2 years, and each time all 5 CDN’s we’ve talked to knew exactly what their competition was charging or proposing to charge. Sometimes because I told them.
It’s still a very insular business – all the rival people we negotiate with know each other by name, and have usually worked together at one CDN or the other before switching jobs. Amazon (and AT&T) are trying to break it open in a big way. We’ll just have to see, but as noted by others, the more players the better.
The more players the better… Having AMAZON more involved is great and should push forward more progress all across.
Bravo!
Mike,
This is all moving in the right direction for Amazon. Cloud computing is the way forward for developers
We have released a new version of Bucket Explorer, which adds support for managing CloudFront Distributions.
http://www.bucketexplorer.com/
AWS is really trying to appeal to a broad range of companies. My company, Convos, only uses two of their 7+ services. While, I think all of the new services are cool, I hope it doesn’t detract from the maintenance and improvement of their other services.
Oh that is really cool. I’ve been hosting content with S3 ready to port over to their CDN when it came out. Migrating now!
Cool, took me about 15 mins to read the docs & migrate to cloudfront. Another 20 mins to tweak my site to correctly read images from the new domain name & I’m done. Bad news is, being in Australia it looks like the closest node is still in the US (LA). Good news I’m getting massive speed improvements. Consistently x2 as fast or more than non-CDN speeds!
Amazon’s costs and negligible to me. I host in Australia and we always go over our included bandwidth at some at $ 3.3 / GB that’s some expensive excess data charges. I’ve been using S3 to serve almost all our image file to avoid some of the bandwidth cost, but I haven’t been happy with S3 speed at this point. This CDN really makes a big difference to me. I’m happy to migrate most of our remaining files across. Awesome work Amazon, fantastic integration with S3 – thanks!
James: can you link your site? I wanna check out the speeds
We developed Visual shopping engine such as Like.com.
Launch affilliate services in ShoppingSite!!!
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Good. Now its ‘cloud computing’ and I am happy it will generate more consulting and employment opportunities
Long ago it used to be called ‘Service Bureas’, then it was called Application Service Provider (ASP) and now its called ‘Cloud Computing’ 
Sucky stuff. Amazon uptime is terrible. No streaming. Plain caching
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this type of CDN has not control over expiry right? Which means each time a photo/thumbnail is loaded it gets pulled from there and therefore charged for in bandwidth and requests. Anyone knows how to avoid this by still using CloudFront?