AWS News Blog
Content Delivery Service Flying High
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Its fun to look at buzz and activity right after a new Amazon Web Service gets launched in this case the service Im thinking about is Amazon CloudFront, which is our new Content Delivery Service. Jeff Barr blogged about CloudFronts 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 until November 30. The post was about www.photos.aero, which is an aircraft enthusiasts site. (I’m a pilot, so Jeff knew that Id 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, its 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 Its 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 its all about customer experience when it comes to content delivery.
Does your site use Amazon CloudFront? What has your experience been? Wed love to hear about it.
— Mike