Amazon Web Services on Thursday said that it is developing a
content delivery service that will allow Amazon Simple Storage
System (S3) customers to deliver files upon demand quickly and
efficiently.
The as-yet-unnamed service is similar in concept to the content
delivery networks operated by Akamai and Limelight, which provide
low latency, high speed data transmission to facilitate the
distribution of digital content. It is being tested by a small
group of Amazon Web Services (AWS) beta customers and will be made
available to all AWS customers before the end of 2008.
Tal Saraf, general manager of the AWS content delivery service,
said while pricing had yet to be determined, the service would hew
to AWS' pay-per-use, no-contract philosophy.
Adam Selipsky, VP of product management and developer relations
at AWS, said that Amazon is developing the service in response to
customer interest. "We have a large and varied customer base for
Amazon S3 and some of the significant use cases for it are about
distributing a popular object," he said. "A lot of those customers
have asked us for a method of distribution."
Initially, the service will deliver data over HTTP connections.
Eventually, it will be able to provide security, authentication,
and streaming.
In a blog post announcing the launch of the new service, Amazon
CTO Werner Vogels points out that the "cloud computing" metaphor
suggests that the location of servers and customers doesn't matter
-- everyone is in the "cloud," after all.
While "location transparency" is desirable for users of cloud
computing services, Vogels says cloud computing developers cannot
afford to think that way. They need more control, to deliver data
and services from edge locations, rather than from the far side of
the "cloud."
"[A]s much as we would like to see the cloud to be transparent,
the transport of network packets is still limited to the speed of
light (at best) and customers of cloud applications may experience
a different performance depending on where they are located in
relation to where the applications are running," said Vogels.