Content distribution, now for the masses

We’ve known about Akamai, who’s been long regarded as the leaders in CDN technology for some time now. As of a few weeks ago, there’s a new kid on the block.

On the 19th of November, Amazon released CloudFront, and it’s what I think has been lacking in their S3 storage solution that now makes Amazon a key competitor on the CDN front. That of what Amazon has termed “Edge Zones”. Nothing particularly complex in the definition: You upload your content, and you can have Edge Zones in the USA, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan. Amazon will automatically fetch the data from S3, cache it at the Edge Zone location, and from that point forward the transfer time for your users will be blistering!

I fully expect to see some really innovative uses coming out of this and we’ll keep tabs on it here and keep you abreast of the happenings. If you’ve got a project you’re working on that uses 00CloudFront, feel free to comment here. It would be really good to see the different uses people have for CDN tech.