Amazon CloudFront has been a big hit. We're adding customers, locations, and features at a rapid clip. Let's take a look at what's been going on.
Lots of Customers
We now have over 20,000 active* CloudFront customers; this is double the number of customers we had at this time last year. Based on a quick search of CDN vendor web sites and public financial reports, we believe that this would make Amazon CloudFront the largest global CDN according to published customer counts. We are seeing strong usage from the enterprise (PBS, IMDB, and Sega, to name a few) and from startups (Encoding.com and Rent Jungle, among many others). These customers use CloudFront to deliver their content at high speed with low latency.
* - Active means that the customer has used CloudFront in the given month.
Customers come to CloudFront because it is easy to get started (see the CloudFront Getting Started Guide for more information). Once on board, they stay because they are pleased with the scalability, performance, and the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Because CloudFront is part of the AWS family, it works really well with our other services. You can store your static content in Amazon S3 and create a CloudFront distribution from an S3 bucket in minutes. You can generate dynamic or streamed content in an Amazon EC2 instance and, once again, set up a distribution in a matter of minutes.
Lots of Features
The team has been focusing on new features for CloudFront. We recently added AWS Identity and Access Management Support and Live Streaming. Before that we added enhanced Management Console support, private content, live streaming with Adobe Flash Media Server, HTTPS support, request logging, custom origins, and more.
Lots of Edge Locations
We now have 21 edge locations including Sao Paolo, Brazil (our first location in South America), Paris (launched in February), and Stockholm (launched in June). We have also added a second location in Los Angeles (California) to increase connectivity and to provide even better service for our customers. Requests for objects are intelligently routed to these edge locations for lowest possible latency. We will continue to be smart about where we add new locations and only add them where we can drive measurable improvements in performance and lower latency. This ensures that our customers continue to benefit from even lower prices as we scale.
Lower Pricing
We lowered our prices for CloudFront this past July. At that time we reduced CloudFront's data transfer pricing in the US and Europe, and we added a 5 PB usage tier at a correspondingly lower cost. We also lowered the cost of transferring data out of Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, further reducing your costs when you use either of those two services as your origin server. We will continue to lead the CDN industry in driving prices down for our customers.
With CloudFront‘s pricing, you only pay for your actual usage. You can find pricing for CloudFront and all other AWS Services on the AWS pricing page. Although most of our customers appreciate and take advantage of the pay-as-you-go nature of CloudFront, we also offer lower prices for customers that are able to commit to a certain level of usage.
Awards and Recognition
Earlier this month, CloudFront won the Reader's Choice award in the Delivery Network category at the Streaming Media Europe Conference. This is the second year that CloudFront has been recognized in this way. It is also cool to see a number of other AWS and CloudFront customers on the list including Sorenson Media and Wowza Media.
-- Jeff;
PS - There are a number of CloudFront jobs on the AWS Jobs List. Check them out if you would like to join our team!
Kinda disappointing that new edge locations are all in USA. There are huge gaps in asia, africa, south america, middle-east, australia etc... I understand that a lot of internetters live in the USA, but please dont forget the rest of the world!
Posted by: Wouter | December 14, 2011 at 03:27 AM
Nice post. I found this articles which compares Caspio, Amazon, Database.com, and Microsoft SQL cloud database services
http://blog.caspio.com/web-database/comparing-cloud-database-services/
Posted by: Scott Levy | December 22, 2011 at 05:54 AM