Amazon to add Content Delivery Service, continues to kicks butt
Wow, I just got this in my mailbox this morning, Amazon is in beta right now with a Content Delivery Service (CDS). They’ll be competing with the likes of CDS giant Akamai in putting content closer to the end user. (CDS’s take your web content, like images or video or whatever, put them in datacenters all around the world and then use deep magic to make sure your visitors get to the closest instance to them making it a much faster experience - more or less).
This is, in my opinion, an amazing step for them. On the one hand it’s always tough to battle the existing monsters in an industry, but Amazon has a metric boatload going for them. Obviously they have a great brand in general, with a global store and an increasing presence in digital sales they clearly have a large existing infrastructure that they’ve generalized. It isn’t like they just started this thing up.
More importantly, though, as the latest component in an increasingly robust AWS offering it integrates seamlessly with the already widely used S3. According to Amazon it’s as easy as making a single API call to basically register an object already in S3 (which are easily uploaded) with the CDS and using the url it returns. It’s that simple, accessible to anyone who wants to use it and of course as with all the AWS services you pay for only what you use, they don’t have any baseline fees or anything. This is truly CDS for the masses (unless of course it turns out that they leave form and overprice the usage cost).
Obviously at this point details on this are pretty scarce, they’ve just got that little brochure page up with some top line information. Nevertheless, you can see how well this slots in with their whole AWS ecosystem. What I love about AWS in general is that each offering alone is pretty worthwhile and useful to people, but as they launch more and more and you see how well they interoperate with each other, AWS as a whole becomes a much more compelling datacenter environment.
Looking at EC2 with its Availability Zones feature that lets you bring up instances in specified geographic locations. At this point it is more focused on redundancy, but it’s not a far stretch to believe that at some point Amazon’s CDS will also allow for geographic load balancing of application servers. Of course this would be a revolution in load balancing for some purposes since it is so easy to bring up new instances of servers wherever Amazon allows (as opposed to the current difficulty in doing every single element of this architecture). Again, right now, there aren’t a ton of availability zones, but it’s only a matter of time before more are made available.
Since I’m obsessed, I have to make an analogy with the iPhone. I believe that one big reason for Apple’s success in the iPhone is that they control the entire stack from the hardware all the way on up, this gives them the freedom to move quickly and accomplish things that more piecemeal companies couldn’t do. Amazon AWS is a bit like that in the hosting service. They provide services at several levels of abstraction that offer strengths and conveniences to their customers that other companies like a traditional hosting company or a traditional CDS can’t easily match.
There’s still plenty of reasons not to choose AWS right now for hosting, but those are getting fewer and fewer as they quickly improve the service. It seems sorta true what they just blogged, they really don’t seem to be content. It all confirms my position of being long AMZN. What’s your thoughts on all this stuff that Seattle’s pumping out? You a fan or a hater?
