Cloud distribution network

"Beta everything" prevails and Amazon launches CloudFront (beta), a content delivery network sitting on top of S3. I think this is a great and logical addition to Amazon's service buffet. For those who used S3 for storage and delivery, there is now less need to worry about burst performance.

Companies like SmugMug or Wordpress.com, who have migitated cost, uptime and performance worries with in-house caching and delivery solution will likely be, at the same time, less interested and better positioned to take advantage of this new service. While in-house assets like company images, css and javascript might find their way into the CDN relatively fast, their core business is unlikely to see a benefit from the increased expenditures. They are centered around high-number-low-yield asset collections: Personal photo collections and, on-average, low-traffic blogs.

CloudFront is still a significant shift in the CDN market, precisely because it jumps into an underserved niche. A niche that Amazon helped grow tremendously. That's why it was only logical take a step in this direction. CloudFront is an incredibly easy solution to start using. Sites that already run off the cloud can now improve browsing performance world-wide in a matter of minutes. Small companies that are dealing with a sudden popularity blitz can get temporary relief for their infrastructure by handing off asset delivery to a pay-as-you-go CDN.

My back-of-the-napkin calculations for the equivalent of renting 40mbit/s bandwidth from Akamai (if that's even how they operate) would be about $1,300 to $1,500. It's hard to say how that compares to Akamai's pricing structure, but I'm quite certain if that's the amount of money you have to spend, they will laugh in your face. They are just not interested in that market tier.

It's a brave new world.