Cloud Computing Info

CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is Amazon’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN puts very large servers with high throughput at the edge of the network. That means that a CDN provider put cached data in multiple locations through out the network (internet). Requests for data are routed to a local server cache instead of the main server at a host. This improves performance, customer experience and possibly even costs (via lower bandwidth requirements).

An example would be a company that serves many pages to many users. Rather than have all of the pages stored in a central location and be accessed by many people all at once, the pages are distributed throughout the network and sit on many different servers. Akamai does this for Yahoo and many other companies. Limelight is another very large competitor in this space.

CloudFront does the same thing and uses S3 storage as the central repository. Upload the files that you want served to S3 and sign up for CloudFront. Call and API and then use the domain name assigned by the API in your web pages. Amazon will automatically replicate your data (identified by you) to multiple edge locations world wide and re-route requests to the users nearest edge location.

Cost

Storage is cheaper in the US and Europe than in Asian locations. You pay normal S3 prices for the storage of your source files. You don’t pay for storage in the edge servers. Instead you pay for the data transfers out of the Amazon network.

Table 6: CloudFront Data Transfer Costs

You also pay for data requests (each access). Edge servers only support GET requests.

Table 7: CloudFront Request Costs

These prices are accurate as of the time of writing them. As always, verify before making a decision.

SLA

Amazon does not currently have an SLA for CloudFront. I would expect that to change at some point but you should keep it in mind when choosing you content delivery network.

Technorati : amazon, aws, cdn, cloud computing, cloudfront, content, content delivery, data, web service