Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels wrote this morning that the company is "Expanding the Cloud," adding a new service "that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data to their customers world-wide, using low-latency and high data transfer rates. Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access."
This should come as no surprise. Amazon has been blazing the trail to the Cloud for the last few years and with a consumption based model (versus other CDNs which require long term contracts plus consumption payments) this is good news for anyone who is broadly distributing content.
This announcement, while interesting still begs the same questions of how SLAs are managed and what backup and recovery procedures are in place.
Amazon is making it harder and harder for any other vendor to catch up. And perhaps more importantly, Amazon is building everything themselves, not acquiring companies that have built various pieces of the puzzle. Sooner or later the existing Cloud vendors will be aggregated by a BigCo just to remain at par with Amazon.