Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront Streaming Logo

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) offered by Amazon Web Services. CloudFront operates on a pay-as-you-go basis. The service was launched in beta on November 18, 2008.

CloudFront has servers located in Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Spain), Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and India), Australia, South America, as well as in several major cities in the United States. CloudFront now has 51 edge locations across the Globel.

CloudFront competes with larger content delivery networks such as Akamai and Limelight Networks. Upon launch, Larry Dignan of ZDNet News stated that CloudFront could cause price and margin reductions from competing CDNs.

Growth of CloudFront

March 28, 2010 - Amazon Launches edge locations in Singapore and adds Private Content for Streaming
December 15, 2009 - Announced Amazon CloudFront Streaming
November 11, 2009 - Adds support for private content
May 07, 2009 - Adds Access Logging Capability
January 28, 2009 - Amazon Reduces Pricing Tiers for CloudFront
November 18,2008 - Launch of CloudFront

CloudFront Use Cases

1. Website Acceleration
2. Video Streaming
3. Content Download
4. Static / Dynamic Content

CloudFront Logs

Amazon CloudFront allows users to enable or disable logging. If enabled, the logs are stored on Amazon S3 buckets which can then be analyzed. This logs contain useful information like,

1. Date / Time
2. Edge Location
3. Protocol used etc.

These logs can be analyzed by using 3rd party tools, S3Stat, Cloudlytics, Qloudstat

External links

• Amazon CloudFront (official site)