Amazon Launches CDN Offering

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, November 18. 2008 at 10:40 AM EST 1 comment

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Following up on an announcement in September that it would enter the content delivery network (CDN) business, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) just brought the new service to market.

The new service, called Amazon CloudFront, will offer the same no-commitment, pay-as-you-go pricing model that the company offers through its other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings. CloudFront will be integrated with the company's online storage service, Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and its cloud computing service, Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

That could make the service attractive to small and medium-sized businesses that want to use CDN services but don't want to go through the hassle of negotiating contracts with some of the larger content delivery players. 

What also makes Amazon's CloudFront offering attractive for smaller companies is its pricing, which starts at 17 cents per Gigabyte for the 10 Terabytes delivered. And U.S. customers can pay as little as 9 cents a Gigabyte, if they serve more than 150 Terabytes per month.

According to a blog post by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, CloudFront will serve content from 14 edge locations in the U.S., Europe, and Asia:

• United States: Ashburn, Va.; Dallas/Fort Worth; Los Angeles; Miami; Newark, N.j.; Palo Alto, Calif.; Seattle, and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

While the pricing and ease of use may prompt some smaller businesses to sign up, Amazon's CloudFront is not for everyone. That's because the service is missing a lot of bells and whistles that CDN customers may want to use.

CloudFront is HTTP-only, which means it doesn't support video streaming, for one thing. The service also only works with Amazon S3 for storage, which means that customers can't use their own origin servers.

Finally, the service doesn't offer any service-level agreements, so there's no guarantee of performance and reliability. And if the service goes down, or a customer has other issues, the automated nature of signup means that customers won't have dedicated support staff to help out.