Amazon ‘CloudFront’ Promises Cheaper, Faster Downloads
Amazon has announced its new content delivery network service, dubbed CloudFront, which will help even small websites vastly improve their file download speeds. Like its other services, S3 storage, EC2 hosting and more, CloudFront is pay-as-you-go, offering a much cheaper alternative for small sites.
CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) and just might completely change the way your favorite sites deliver files and could make for a significantly faster web. CDNs are what very large sites (like the iTunes Store) use to make downloads much faster.
CDNs work by routing your browser’s file request from a central server to an edge server — generally located near you — which means your request encounters fewer server hops, resulting in lower latency and increased delivery speed (see our earlier write up for more details on how CNS work).
If you’re wondering why every site doesn’t use a CDN, the answer is that they aren’t cheap. Or at least they weren’t until CloudFront came along.
Because Amazon is using the same pay-as-you-go model it pioneered with S3, E2 and other services, even small startups with little cash can use CloudFront and offer visitors much faster downloads at a faction of the cost. That’s good news for startups that want to launch their own iTunes competitors or offer an online software service like Zoho or Basecamp.
While Amazon’s CloudFront may bring the cost of CDNs down to something small sites can afford, it does have its limitations. CloudFront is, at the moment, only offering 14 edge servers. For comparison, competitors like Akamai have edge servers in the tens of thousands.
Still, while the network is small at the moment, look for Amazon to continue expanding it — especially if CloudFront catches on with developers.
If you’re curious, have a look at the developer guide and be sure to check out the full documentation for the details on how you can integrate CloudFront into your site.
[via Simon Willison
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