Amazon to offer content delivery service.
Amazon has made it official. Content delivery networks are officially a commodity.
The company said today that, by the end of the year, it will launch a new service to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer rates. According to the company's web services blog, the service is designed to meet certain goals:
- Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like our other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
- Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that's needed for you to start delivering your content.
- Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
- Have a global presence, using edge locations on three continents in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls the move "an important first step" in expanding the cloud's capabilities for developers. Developers, he said, need to maintain a level of control to ensure that their applications continue to deliver, especially if there are glitches in the cloud that could affect them. We've seen problems with cloud applications in the past an Vogels is smart to acknowledge it:
... a reality is that failures can happen; servers can crash and networks can become disconnected. Even if these are only temporary glitches and are transient errors, the developer of applications in the cloud really wants to make sure his or her application can continue to serve customers even in the face of these rare glitches.
Vogels said the new service will have no commitments or minimum usage requirements - a pay-for-what-you-use model. It's currently in private beta but is expected to be widely available by the end of the year. Those who are interested in being notified about its availability are being directed to this page.