(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Amazon Web Services (aws.amazon.com) has officially launched the public beta of CloudFront, a content delivery service that is integrated with other Amazon services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, fast transfer speeds and no commitments.
According to a company announcement Monday, CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon’s on-demand cloud storage service Simple Storage Service (or S3), which stores the original files, that are subsequently delivered using its global network, automatically routing media requests to the nearest edge location, delivering content with the best possible performance.
Like the company’s other web services, CloudFront only charges clients for the content they actually deliver through the service, and does not require any contracts or commitments.
As CDN offerings increasingly become an inseparable part of hosting services, some web hosts may see Amazon’s new delivery and pricing model as something they can emulate, while others see it as something to outright fear.
Amazon’s new CDN is mainly targeted toward “small to medium-sized businesses and developers who can’t afford, and don’t necessarily need, the more well-known, expensive CDNs like Akamai and Limelight,” according to industry news website CMS Wire.
CMS Wire goes on to say that in the CDN business, “Amazon comes up against some big name players like Akamai and Limelight, and some smaller, lesser known providers such as EdgeCast Networks, Velocix Accelerator, Softlayer and Voxel. It’s entirely possible that Amazon may drive these smaller CDNs completely out of business.”
In May, SoftLayer (www.softlayer.com) has expanded its portfolio of on-demand data center services when it launched CDNLayer, priced at $20.00 per month for the first 200GB of data transferred and 20 cents per additional GB, making a simple and competitive CDN solution for the SMB market.
Technology blog GigaOM founder and senior writer Om Malik wrote on Tuesday that Amazon’s new CDN is poised to become a game-changing CDN technology. “Amazon is going to bring a level of transparency to a business that has a sales model much like a brokerage firm in the 1980s,” he wrote. “Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book.”
