Amazon launches Cloudfront - its own CDN
Posted on | November 26, 2008 |
I may be the last person to write about it. A few months back Amazon pledged to launch its own Content Delivery Network (CDN). And now they are ready with Amazon Cloudfront. Like all Amazon’s cloud services product offerings, this one too comes without any contracts or monthly commitments. Just pay for what you use.
Amazon Cloudfront works by managing a network of servers kept at big data centers at key locations around the globe. Amazon calls them edge locations. So, whenever a visitor browses your website, the CDN picks up the closest edge location and fetches static assets from there. Amazon CDN’s points of presence are at:
- United States - Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth (TX), Los Angeles (CA), Miami (FL), Newark (NJ), Palo Alto (CA), Seattle (WA) and St. Louis (MO)
- European Union - Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
- East Asia - Hong Kong and Tokyo
As we can see, the edge locations are concentrated mainly in United States and Western Europe. There are no edge locations specifically for South Asia, Middle East and Australia. But that isn’t much of a problem since Cloudfront’s pay-per-use model allowed everyone to leverage benefits of traditionally costly CDNs into their applications.
Amazon Cloudfront is tightly integrated with its cloud storage offering Amazon S3. Like Amazon’s other cloud services, Cloudfront too comes with simple documentation to get started. Using Cloudfront is a three step process.
- Upload the original version of your static assets into an Amazon S3 bucket.
- Using Cloudfront APIs, register that S3 bucket and create a new distribution.
- Cloudfront APIs respond with a unique distribution name (xyz123.cloudfront.net). Embed the distribution’s domain name into your application.
Now, whenever a visitor requests static assets from your distribution(xyz123.cloudfront.net) - Cloudfront will figure out the closest edge location and pull content from there. In case the closest edge location doesn’t have a copy of your S3 bucket’s contents, it will fetch it from S3 and locally cache it for future requests.
How to get started with Cloudfront? Read the Cloudfront API docs. Or better still, grab a copy of Bucket Explorer and start creating distributions right away.
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