Amazon announces Amazon CloudFront Beta

Amazon announced today that it was opening a public beta of its highly-anticipated CloudFront content delivery services. We wrote recently about this in 'Amazon announces new content delivery service [1].' What was once speculation, however is now reality and we can now see pricing and functionality for the new service. As expected, the new service is used in conjunction with Amazon S3 online storage services.

The idea is that you can store your content online, then deliver it to users by making a simple API call to register your content with CloudFront. According to the Amazon announcement, "This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location used by Amazon CloudFront for fast delivery of your content."

And pricing seems very reasonable starting at .17 per gb for the first 10 TB of data. The price drops with the more content you deliver. You can learn more about the pricing structure on the CloudFront pricing page [2]. For small and medium sized companies looking to deliver high volume content such as video, this can give you a head start at a reasonable price, so long as you are willing to lock into an Amazon cloud solution.

For more information:
- see the Amazon CloudFront [3] website