One less thing on my to-do list
November 20, 2008 – 9:29 pmI have a notebook full of business ideas that in a perfect world I would love to develop. These ideas range from intelligent DNS systems, fast and scalable hosting environments and even the designs of a cool network switch which will speed up network communication. One of the ideas I had was to setup a scalable, high availability and low cost content delivery network. Thanks to Amazon I will not have to do this…it looks like they beat me to it
With the release of CloudFront, Amazon’s ever-increasing cloud computing service portfolio has increased to include content delivery. This is a new service that caches high-traffic content on the Amazon worldwide network of servers. The basic concept is that the content is served from the closest server on the edge of the Amazon network…leading to fast delivery and low latency.
This isn’t new. Many people do this including Akami and Limelight are already really big in this market. There are several differences between these services. The established brands are rather expensive but in return they provide a full technical and sales support service. They also have extensive networks, much larger than the network that Amazon has.
On the other side, Amazon has built a pay-as-you-go service which is very cheap and easy to use. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service. They have 14 edge locations around the world. These are:
US:
- Ashburn, Virginia
- Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
- Los Angeles, California
- Miami, Florida
- Newark, New Jersey
- Palo Alto, California
- Seattle, Washington
- St. Louis, Missouri
Europe
- Amsterdam
- Dublin
- Frankfurt
- London
Asia
- Hong Kong
- Tokyo
While this is an impressive list, it’s not a patch on Akami who have 34,000 servers in 70 locations. Interestingly, this means that Akami is a perfect acquisition for Amazon….something that might just be possible because Akami seem to be having a bad time at the moment, they just made 7% of their staff redundant. An acquisition of Akami would give amazon access to a much larger network with more edge locations for content delivery and the other range of AWS services.
I put a few slides together to demostrate this at a SuperMondays event…here they are:
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