Amazon.com Launches CloudFront Content Delivery Service

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has announced the launch of Amazon CloudFront, a self-service, pay-as-you-go Web service for content delivery.

Amazon.com, which first announced its plans to launch a content delivery service in September, has now, with the release of CloudFront, delivered a way for developers to distribute content through a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds.

CloudFront works seamlessly with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), according to Amazon.com officials. And, like the other AWS services, CloudFront is self-service with no up-front commitments, no long-term contracts and pay-as-you-go pricing, the company said.

In addition, Amazon.com said the CloudFront service caches copies of content close to users for low latency delivery, and provides the fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to users at scale. Users need to place their objects in an Amazon S3 bucket and then register that bucket with the new service using a simple API call, officials said. This API call then returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations.

One early adoption customer, Playfish, uses Amazon CloudFront to distribute its social games. "We've grown very rapidly to over 25 million registered players, and we now serve over 2 billion minutes of game play every month," Playfish CTO Sami Lababidi said in a statement. "CloudFront has reduced the time it takes for any customer, wherever they are, to access our games through CloudFront's fast download speeds. AWS also allows us to stay flexible as we grow and only pay for what we actually use without any long-term contracts or usage commitments."

"We found the CloudFront API to be very simple to use, and we were able to easily add support for the service to our product," Rahul Jonna, an engineer at Suchi Software Solutions, said in a statement. "The S3Fox Organizer is a simple visual way to turn an Amazon S3 bucket into a CloudFront distribution right from a Web browser in a matter of seconds."

Adam Selipsky, vice president of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, said, "Our customers asked us for a way to globally distribute their most frequently accessed content with all the benefits that Amazon Web Services provides—low, pay-as-you-go pricing, high performance and reliability."

Amazon.com officials said CloudFront is particularly suited to functions such as video distribution, software downloads, music downloads, and delivering frequently accessed Web site images and objects.

Any business or developer can access the beta of CloudFront by visiting here.