Amazon to Launch Content Delivery Network
This morning, Amazon announced that it would soon launch a content delivery network (CDN). This new service, which does not have a name yet, will be complimentary to Amazon's existing web services and will work seamlessly with S3, Amazon's online storage solution. Like most of Amazon's web services, this new product will not require a contract and does not have any minimum-usage requirements. Amazon did not announce a specific launch date, but it expects the new service to be available by the end of this year.
With this new service, Amazon is going up against a number of established companies, including Akamai and Limelight, which are almost synonymous with content delivery. While these larger CDN providers tend to target enterprise customers, though, Amazon's pay-as-you-go plan seems to be geared towards smaller businesses and developers who might not have a sustained need for a complex CDN solution.
Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.
Preemptive Move
Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.
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Does this mean that eventually we can replace our web hosting service with Amazon S3?
I am not clear with the service. Is amazon going to offer create our own store on their server? If that's the case, this is not an innovative idea, which EBay provides somehow for a long time.
It's not about offering up web hosting for a website. More about serving static content from a network that has servers world wide, like S3. They have the resoureces to deliver static content (e.g. html files, images, css, js) much faster than a personal web server could.