A CloudFront is Moving In

Amazon yesterday announced the arrival of what they term a content delivery system that adds one more piece to the puzzle that is cloud computing.

Ever hear of Akamai? They provide what amounts to web caching on a global scale. If you are in Asia, accessing a web site that is located in Europe, the site content might be served from Hong Kong. Of course, this is only if content caching is set up with a service such as Akamai. This is much faster and more efficient than getting the content from the European data center where the actual web server is located. Make sense? Good!

Previously, this required a major commitment of money and time to be able to do this. Not anymore.

Amazon is now rolling out the same service (called CloudFront in Amazonspeak), integrated with S3, that will provide a better experience for your customer just as Akamai does. Caching servers are located in the following locations:

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

Cost is based on where the content is delivered from, and it looks reasonable—even a bargain. The US pricing is roughly comparable to the standard pricing, and the European location pricing actually looks cheaper (why, I have no clue).  The Asian locations have not been available before, but currently their cost is a little steep in my opinion. One good thing is that if you wait for three to six months with Amazon, they will lower the cost. All pricing is listed here.

How do you integrate the caching with your current Amazon setup? It’s very simple actually. A simple API, as with other Amazon services, allows you to configure the content so that it can be served from CloudFront instead of the normal content location. If you already have experience with Amazon services you should be able to serve content from CloudFront in under an hour.

If you are already using Amazon to serve web pages, this is a no-brainer. If you aren’t, maybe this is what tips you into using the Amazon services.

Here is the homepage for CloudFront.