Why You Can Trust CNET Amazon launches content delivery network
Company goes live with CloudFront, which promises to work closely with its popular S3 service, with "low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments."
In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.
The service, which promises "low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments," uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.
Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is "no minimum fee" for CloudFront; customers pay only for what they use.
There are loads of CDNs out there: it's an on-demand, business-focused offering for which companies are willing to pay good money. But because Amazon already has a big grip on the cloud with its existing Simple Storage Service, or S3, CloudFront is likely to be a power player from the start.