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Two months ago I wrote about Amazon’s plans for launching a Content Delivery Network (What’s a Content Delivery Network?). Today, Amazon announced CloudFront - “a service designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.”

So what does this CDN have to offer?

“Today marks the launch of Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.” via Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon

Sounds pretty cool right? We will definitely be using this at 48Web for a new project we are launching soon… What for? Hosting and serving multimedia, images, and some downloadable material.

Do you have any questions about using a CDN for your website or business? Ask us questions in the comments or ask me directly.

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Today Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 - the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (I think that means it is out of beta). This means it now comes with a Service Level Agreement - which one would think will dramatically increase adoption rates by medium-large sized companies. The SLA provides a 99.95% availability commitment.

Amazon Web Services also announce the availability of the beta for EC2 running Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server.

Amazon EC2 will provide an ideal environment for deploying ASP.NET web sites, high performance computing clusters, media transcoding solutions, and many other Windows-based applications. Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Windows Server or SQL Server offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees. Pricing for Amazon EC2 running Windows Server begins at $0.125 per compute hour.

They also provided insights into future plans for 2009 to help companies using their services plan for future roll outs. These enhancements include:

• Load balancing - Enables AWS customers to balance incoming requests and distribute traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
• Auto-scaling - Automatically grows and shrinks usage of Amazon EC2 compute capacity based on application requirements.
• Cloud monitoring - Enables AWS customers to monitor operational metrics of Amazon EC2, providing visibility into usage of the AWS cloud.
• Management Console - Provides a simple, point-and-click web interface that lets customers manage and access their AWS cloud resources.

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Yesterday I wrote about Amazon’s entrance into the Content Delivery Network (CDN) space with their newest web service offering. CDN’s are not a new technology and this is actually a crowded market - one that Amazon hopes to enter and commoditize.

What is a Content Delivery Network?
In layman’s terms a CDN provides the ability to deliver content in a scalable, highly available, and cost-efficient way. If you want a more technical explanation (who does?) here’s what Wikipedia has to offer:

Modern CDN’s can dynamically distribute assets to strategically placed redundant core, fallback and edge servers. Modern CDN’s can have automatic server availability sensing with instant user redirection. A CDN can offer 100% availability, even with large power, network or hardware outages.

Modern CDN technologies give more control of asset delivery and network load. They can optimize capacity per customer, provide views of realtime load and statistics, reveal which assets are popular, show active regions and report exact viewing details to the customers. - via Wikipedia

As I mentioned, Amazon is entering a crowded market with the likes of Akamai, Limelight, and CDNetworks. Luckily they have a good start with their Simple Storage Service (S3) - which will provide the backbone of their new CDN.

How does a content delivery network work?
Here is a simple example…

What does this mean for you?
Ahh the big question… I can just see Doug asking - “All this tech crap is cool but how will this help me?” Well, since you asked I’ll tell you how we use a CDN at 48Web. We don’t use anything fancy at this point - just Amazon S3. Simply enough - we use it to host *stuff* so we don’t have to worry about our websites going down due to the increased load - which helps us scale. We learned this lesson when we launched Iowa Flood (our citizen journalism experiment). Within hours of launching we were getting hit with thousands of requests every few minutes. Needless to say our shared hosting environment for our “experiment” couldn’t handle it. In order to offload most of the strain we moved all the multimedia content to Amazon S3. Our thoughts were “let them worry about handling this load” while we concentrate on our user’s experience.

We also use this in our product development. In order to take the strains off our server we host our images, icons, javascripts, css, etc on S3. This takes the load off our servers and lets it scale much easier. At that point all we need to worry about is how efficient our connectivity is to our database - as we let the CDN take care of all our “assets”. We’re developers - not System Administrators. A CDN gives us a worry free distribution model that is VERY cheap.

How much does this stuff cost?
Current CDN solutions are very expensive but I have a feeling that Amazon is going to completely undercut the CDN market by offering their standard “pay for only what you use” approach which is great. It helps small companies (like us) scale based on demand. Our monthly bill for Amazon S3 is often under $5/mo. I am hoping their CDN can offer similar prices.

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As usual if you have any questions about CDN’s, leave a comment. If you want to know how your company can leverage this awesome technology, feel free to Ask Andy.

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