A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a provider’s network of servers situated around the globe to effectively deliver web content to the end users. A CDN is the best solution in addressing inherent performance and scalability problems associated with delivering of web content on a global scale. While a CDN is an appropriate solution to address such performance problems, however, the downside to using a commercial CDN is the high costs associated with it and the long term contracts. Typically the cost is determined based on the data served by the CDN provider. The more traffic processed by the commercial CDN, higher the bill.

Amazon provides a set of web services with the goal of minimizing the entries of barrier, when enabling a business online. In this context, their highly popular cloud computing platform called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the market leader in cloud computing space. While the benefits to using EC2 (or cloud computing) is in easy provisioning of servers and automatic scaling up or down based on traffic needs. However, from an application owner’s/developer’s viewpoint, this is not enough. Other core infrastructure components are needed in order to make the application management simple. Sensing this need, Amazon began to provide other infrastructure components wrapped as services such as a persistent store called SimpleDB (a column oriented database), Simple Storage Service (S3, another persistent store), Elastic Block Storage (EBS, another persistent store - a la local file system), and Simple Queue Service (SQS, a queuing service).  While SQS, SimpleDB and S3 services are unique to Amazon’s cloud offering, using these services in application architecture limits portability to another cloud provider. However, arguably the benefits from using these services outweigh the issues arising out of limitations in portability or flexibility.

Amazon is introducing another infrastructure service, a content delivery service built on S3, which will be available by the end of this year. This was announced today and is yet to be named. The content delivery service will be accessible through a single API over HTTP supporting static content initially. Support for streaming content might come in the future. Amazon hasn’t fully disclosed its features and pricing for its content delivery service yet. However, the market perception around pricing for this service is expected to be competitive and affordable to SMB’s.

Is price the only determining factor for Amazon’s CDN adoption? Probably not, companies who are looking for free CDN solutions have the option of choosing an existing open source CDN such as Coral CDN or Globule. The key differentiator between Amazon’s content delivery service among others, would be in the value add services that it can offer, while keeping the CDN bill low without affecting performance to the end user. For example, the value add services included in the base price can be:

1. Ability to deliver content even when S3 is not available. (Hint: Caching, hence a need for a caching service)
2. Eliminate the need to download duplicate content. (Again caching can help here)
3. Enable the content delivery service to open concurrent connections from the browser to download content from a S3.

Amazon’s content delivery service will be a compelling service for businesses hosted on EC2. Additionally with features as mentioned above and in combination with evolving support for a streaming/broadcast digital media formats would present an opportunity for enterprises to adopt it. It is interesting to note Akamai and Limelight Networks are the industry leading content delivery firms, currently providing CDN solutions to Amazon. Much or all of this business from Amazon to them might be impacted, if Amazon were to use their content delivery solution.