We're Never Content

We've got something new and cool in the works and I'm excited to be able to tell you a little bit about it today!

Before the end of the year we are planning to release a new service for content delivery. This new (and as yet unnamed) service will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

The new service was designed to meet the following goals:

• Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like our other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
• Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that's needed for you to start delivering your content.
• Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
• Have a global presence, using edge locations on three continents in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You will start by storing your content in an Amazon S3 bucket and then marking the content as publicly readable. Next you'll make a single API call to register the bucket. The call will return a domain name that you'll use to refer to your content in your web page or application. When clients request the object via the returned domain name they'll be routed to the nearest edge location, for high performance delivery.

As I noted above, we plan to have this service available before the end of the year. If you'd like to be notified when we launch, you can express your interest here.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has also written about Expanding The Cloud.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Jorge Oliveira]

It would be great if one could create a cname media.domain.com pointing to S3 (as we currently may do) and then requests like http://media.doman.com/pic.jpg would be routed automatically to the near S3 datacenter.

[Damien Tanner]

This couldn't have been better timed. We recently released Panda (see http://pandastream.com), an open source video platform. Having a CDN to serve up video content is going to be unbelievably useful!

[frederic sidler]

Who do I need to send swiss cheese and chocolate to be part of this beta ;-)

[Robert Accettura]

Would be great if it were possible to use a CNAME to use Amazon's CDN as a layer which then contacts the origin similar to other CDN's. That way no engineering effort is necessary to take advantage of it. Simply passing the right headers is all that's necessary, and one should be doing that already.

I hope that's in the roadmap.

[Tom Hearn]

Would love to be on the beta for this, any way I can pay someone off :)

[gordyt]

Jeff this is great news. We are in the process of moving all our online services to EC2 and the ability to serve our static media via a convenient Amazon CDN would be a big help.

[Niraj J]

"marking the content as publicly readable"

What does this mean. Will I be allowed to give access to users and group based on my scheme?

To me this is a key requirement for Content Delivery system. Ability to manage permissions on content.

[Dan]

Will this CDN service also support SSL?

I have a few ecommerce sites using SSL I would like to ensure load as quickly as possible, but I am having a hard time finding CDNs that provide this service that are not targeted towards larger businesses.

[Jim Jones]

Glad to hear that S3 is finally turning into a real CDN. Be sure to provide enough capacity, I predict this will drive many new customers to you! ;-)

[Felix Chu]

1. If call the CDN API to an existing bucket in US, is that mean S3 will replicate the data to Europe? Then the generated CDN link do a redirection to nearest download site (EU / US)

2. The CDN API generated link, is it for download file only? can it display content directly on web browser. e.g. if there is a big sized photo need CDN, then can the CDN link's photo content be displayed on web page? or download only?

[Valerieb]

I have friends at big media companies who currently use Limelight and Akamai. Is anyone going to seriously move from Akamai to Amazon CDN? I'd be curious if any of you or someone you know are seriously contemplating a switch. Content distribution for a lot of folks is pretty mission critical and Akamai has a 10year lead. My humble 2 cents.

[Anand Ganesan]

There has been so much of noise in the blogosphere on the price factor alone that would contribute to Amazon's content delivery success.

Is price the only determining factor for Amazon’s CDN adoption? Probably not, companies who are looking for free CDN solutions have the option of choosing an existing open source CDN such as Coral CDN or Globule. The key differentiator between Amazon’s content delivery service among others, would be in the value add services that it can offer, while keeping the CDN bill low without affecting performance to the end user. For example, the value add services included in the base price can be:

1.Ability to deliver content even when S3 is not available. (a need for a caching service)
2.Eliminate the need to download duplicate content. (Again caching can help here)
3.Enable the content delivery service to open concurrent connections from the browser to download content from a S3.

...

The above is an excerpt from my blog (article here): http://tinyurl.com/4uydzf

Thanks,
Anand
www.byteonic.com

[peter]

Verner Wogels gave a great presentation at the Streaming Media West conference:

http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/10/15/werner-vogels-amazon-asw-s3-ec2/