content delivery network

Why Your Business Needs Amazon S3

by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 20, 2009

At 48Web, we use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for all of our business file storage, backups, and as a content delivery network. In past at startups I have been involved with we have had to purchase file servers for backup and network storage as well as media streaming servers. Now we have “cloud storage” that, buzz words aside, is really quite a rermarkable solution for a small startup business. There are no startup costs – you just sign up and pay for what you use.

So how do we use Amazon S3 for our business? First off we use it for file storage. If you have ever worked in any size business – you are likely familiar with “file servers” or “network drives” where a bunch of files are located that are accessible by authorized users in your company. We use Amazon S3 for that. It’s accessible anywhere – on any pc or mac – and has authentication and authorization roles so you can lock it down.

We also use Amazon S3 for all of our backups. We backup our WordPress sites to Amazon S3 regularly. Our Subversion (source control) repositories are automatically backed up to Amazon S3. And last, our PCs and Macs are backed up to Amazon S3. We are all taken care of – in “the cloud”.

Last we use Amazon S3 as a content delivery network. This CDN serves our images, videos, and podcasts to the websites we host. We do this for several reasons. Their Amazon CloudFront service:

“..gives businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments”

Well said. In addition to that Amazon CloudFront uses an “edge network” – distributed locations – for content delivery to ensure the best peformance. Think of this edge network like there are servers storing your multimedia content in Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. If I request your content here in Des Moines, IA it will grab the data from the Chicago server – because it’s the closest geographically.

If you have any questions about using Amazon S3 or CloudFront in your business, let us know!

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Amazon CloudFront – A Content Delivery Network

by Andy Brudtkuhl on November 18, 2008

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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Content Delivery Networks – Demystified

by Andy Brudtkuhl on September 19, 2008

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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Amazon Web Services Content Delivery Service

by Andy Brudtkuhl on September 18, 2008

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting ready to launch a new Content Delivery Service. While there have been little technical details let out they do say the new service will be delivered before the end of the year. This is a natural progression for the Amazon Web Services team as these CDS/CDN’s are growing in popularity as companies figure out how to scale heavy multimedia requirements – from video to podcasts to mobile content.

This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. Our goal is to create a content delivery service that:

Lets developers and businesses get started easily – there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.

Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.

Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.

Has a global presence – we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

I like that they are building this new service on top of their existing S3 storage infrastructure. Although I am a little confused as of yet what kind of value this brings over just hosting your content on S3 publicly (which is what we do).

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