Amazon Taking on Akamai with Cloud Network

Ars Technica reports: Amazon has announced a new content delivery system for customers of its S3 storage service. Available by year-end, the new system will provide high-bandwidth, low-latency data distribution across the globe. The new service will rival Akamai, Limelight, and CDNetworks, the dominant players in the $1 billion a year content delivery market.

With its existing cloud computing offerings, Amazon has shown that it's able to provide versatile, high capacity networked services at affordable prices (although not without occasional hiccups). The central premise of these efforts is that location doesn't matter; the cloud services are accessed over the Internet, and so the computers they are served from could be located one mile way or a thousand miles for all the difference it makes to cloud applications.

Although this location transparency has its benefits, and is indeed one of the key advantages claimed for cloud computing--it allows cloud applications to scale and tolerate faults--there are situations where
location matters. Content delivery is one of these. Local servers offer lower latencies that are especially important for streaming applications, and reduce loading on networks and systems alike. Instead of having to serve all data from one location, content delivery networks (CDNs) serve data from a location near the end-user, spreading the network and system load across many different machines and locales.

Amazon's content delivery system (as yet unnamed) will allow cloud users to take advantage of localized delivery. The system will be an extension of the company's existing S3 storage service; it will be possible to distribute any file in S3 over the new system. One of Amazon's key aims is that its CDN should be easy to use and integrate with current S3 applications. To that end, only a single API call will be required to access an S3 file through the CDN.

In keeping with Amazon's other cloud services, the CDN will not require any up-front commitment or minimum usage, favoring instead a pay-for-usage model. Together, these decisions should make the Amazon
CDN an attractive and low-risk upgrade to existing S3 data delivery.

Amazon is already a major player in the nascent cloud computing market, and its CDN will likely extend its reach further still. The likes of Akamai certainly don't have anything to worry about yet; they have large, entrenched user bases and a huge market share. But Amazon's system is likely to be popular with smaller customers--anyone with a credit card can sign up, and you pay nothing if you serve no content. If the book-seller can build some momentum behind its CDN, it could yet rival the big boys.

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