As I wrote in a previous post, Amazon is entering the CDN (Content Delivery Network) market. Today in a series of posts, Jeff Barr and Werner Vogels announced CloudFront, a Beta CDN service available now from Amazon and built on top of AWS (Amazon Web Services).
This is significant for startups, such as Compendium Blogware, for a few reasons. Gaining access to a CDN has in the past been a potentially costly, if not time consuming proposal. However, with so many startups building on top of the infrastructure available through AWS, the cost to leverage this new CDN for those startups will be very low.
Amazon has done something very smart here. They decided to provide a service that most of their S3 customers would probably leverage but that many people probably would not move to AWS for. That is, the primary users of this service initially will most likely be existing AWS fanboys (like me). The benefit of this approach is that the beta users are customers who are already familiar with your service and who are going to be able to provide reasonable feedback.
It will be interesting to see what large companies decide to bail on CDN services from companies like Akamai and Limelight in favor for an integrated solution from Amazon. It probably won't happen today but I can see that switch starting as soon as AWS moves CloudFront out of beta.
