TimmyH
Amazon Aims at Content Delivery
December 2nd 2008 07:50
Startups may be drawn to the company's content-delivery network.
Amazon has become a major player in cloud computing in recent years. Many Web startups have come to rely on its pay-as-you-go hosting and computing services rather than investing in costly and complex infrastructure of their own. The newest offering from Amazon Web Services, called Cloudfront, may provide insight into Amazon's long-term business model. This new product offers companies that are already hooked on Amazon storage and processing the ability to distribute their content and thus make themselves more stable and reliable.
Cloudfront is a distributed content-delivery network. It improves the performance of a website by strategically placing copies of that site's content on servers around the world. A user of such a site who is located in Europe, for example, might see an improvement in performance by loading that data from a European server, rather than from the original server hosted in the United States.
James Staten, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, believes that Cloudfront is likely to attract startups that are new to using content-delivery networks. But this might not be a bad thing for more-established players. "If I was Akamai, I wouldn't be too worried," Staten says. "Because [Cloudfront] is a limited implementation, it becomes a nice on-ramp for customers, when they mature, to move up to Akamai." Growing companies may eventually move on, he says, because "the value of a content-delivery network is directly related to how many locations it provides you." More-established content-delivery companies are currently much better than Amazon at providing sophisticated access to a wide variety of locations, Staten says.
But even though Amazon Cloudfront may be less sophisticated, Staten says that Amazon's popular S3 and EC2 products are "absolutely" going to draw companies into trying Cloudfront and any other add-ons that Amazon develops in the future. "If you're drinking the Kool-Aid and the experience is good," Staten says, "there's no point in not trying the additional services that they make available to you."
By Erica Naone
Really Long Link
Amazon has become a major player in cloud computing in recent years. Many Web startups have come to rely on its pay-as-you-go hosting and computing services rather than investing in costly and complex infrastructure of their own. The newest offering from Amazon Web Services, called Cloudfront, may provide insight into Amazon's long-term business model. This new product offers companies that are already hooked on Amazon storage and processing the ability to distribute their content and thus make themselves more stable and reliable.
Amazon's Cloud Computing
Cloudfront is a distributed content-delivery network. It improves the performance of a website by strategically placing copies of that site's content on servers around the world. A user of such a site who is located in Europe, for example, might see an improvement in performance by loading that data from a European server, rather than from the original server hosted in the United States.
James Staten, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, believes that Cloudfront is likely to attract startups that are new to using content-delivery networks. But this might not be a bad thing for more-established players. "If I was Akamai, I wouldn't be too worried," Staten says. "Because [Cloudfront] is a limited implementation, it becomes a nice on-ramp for customers, when they mature, to move up to Akamai." Growing companies may eventually move on, he says, because "the value of a content-delivery network is directly related to how many locations it provides you." More-established content-delivery companies are currently much better than Amazon at providing sophisticated access to a wide variety of locations, Staten says.
But even though Amazon Cloudfront may be less sophisticated, Staten says that Amazon's popular S3 and EC2 products are "absolutely" going to draw companies into trying Cloudfront and any other add-ons that Amazon develops in the future. "If you're drinking the Kool-Aid and the experience is good," Staten says, "there's no point in not trying the additional services that they make available to you."
By Erica Naone
Really Long Link
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