AWS News Blog

Three More CloudFront / Route 53 Edge Locations – New York, Indiana, San Jose

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We have added three more Amazon CloudFront / Route 53 edge locations, bringing the total number of global locations to 24. The new locations are in New York, Indiana, and San Jose, California. The AWS Global Infrastructure map includes a complete list.

I sat down with some members of the CloudFront team to learn more about the process of selecting and building out new locations for CloudFront and Route 53.

The team is primarily driven by performance and cost. On the performance / location side, suggestions for possible new locations come from a variety of sources including conversations with our customers, notes from our sales team, and from discussions on the CloudFront forum. If you have reason to believe that there’s a need for a location in a particular place, we would definitely like to hear from you. We have additional locations in the pipeline for 2012 and beyond; your feedback will help us to prioritize our efforts.

In addition to suggestions from customers, we also measure latency from various points around the globe to our existing set of locations. We correlate the latency metrics with predictions for growth in broadband Internet penetration and match this up against existing CloudFront usage in the area.

We also look at how each location connects to the Internet (some locations are far better connected than others, with multiple connections and peering points). We look at traffic to our existing locations and see if some of it could be served up from a different location with better results.

All of this data results in a candidate list of proposed locations that we then evaluate for further consideration (each location represents a considerable investment in time, technology, connectivity, and people). Once the list is reviewed and prioritized, the actual build out process is initiated for those locations.

We also work to drive down our own costs in order to continue to make CloudFront a better and better value over time. We do this by being selective about where we build out new locations, peering directly with other internet networks and through price negotiations. The resulting cost savings are passed along to you in the form of lower prices. The team then continuously monitors latency to ensure that each new location provides the best possible performance to end users.

At any given time the CloudFront team is simultaneously running the service, adding new features, adding new locations, and planning for future growth. It is a complex, large-scale logistical challenge that draws upon the expertise of a multitude of other AWS teams. If this sounds like your kind of challenge, perhaps you would like to join the CloudFront team. Here are some of the current openings:

— Jeff;

Modified 3/12/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.