Content Delivery Service Flying High

It’s fun to look at buzz and activity right after a new Amazon Web Service gets launched – in this case the service I’m thinking about is Amazon CloudFront, which is our new Content Delivery Service. Jeff Barr blogged about CloudFront’s features and benefits when the service launched last week.

What prompted this particular blog post was a Twitter message (“tweet”) that Jeff saw and  forwarded to me. “Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, small websites can take advantage of a CDN. I don't think Photos.aero will spend $10 ‘til November 30.” The post was about www.photos.aero, which is an aircraft enthusiasts’ site. (I’m a pilot, so Jeff knew that I’d be interested.)

That is indeed amazing! Until Amazon CloudFront came along, setting up content distribution was a real pain, in my opinion. You had to contact the service provider, do the whole “sales cycle” dance, and then wonder if in fact your prices were market price, or whether you signed up to pay a premium. The AWS approach is very egalitarian, and while I am certain that sales folks are nice people, it’s not a scalable approach for the vendor and the fact of the matter is that many technical folks don’t want to put a process between them and deployment.

Doug Kaye, founder of IT Conversations, and author of Loosely Coupled – The Missing Pieces of Web Services, agrees. In a recent blog post Doug said “It’s a no-brainer way to speed up almost any web site. For those assets like CSS, JavaScript files, frequently used images, icons, etc., the performance is as good as any CDN I’ve used but at a fraction of the cost.” He continued to write “Pricing of storage, hosting, servers and now content delivery was previously mysterious and highly negotiable — like by an order of magnitude. AWS has brought transparency to the world of web-service pricing.)”.

Getting back to www.photos.aero, go check out the site. I was amazed by how quickly the photos loaded here in Seattle. You should have the same experience in much of the world. And in the end it’s all about customer experience when it comes to content delivery.

Does your site use Amazon CloudFront? What has your experience been? We’d love to hear about it.

-- Mike

Comments

[Jeffrey Rosen]

Wolfire Games has a similar story. We are an independent video game studio, yet our graphics heavy site (http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth) loads very quickly thanks to Amazon cloudfront. We pay less than $50/month for the service. :)

[Andrew S]

I'll use it the day you have SSL support!