Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It's another step toward cloud computing, and it will be available later this year.
Amazon is no stranger to the cloud. The retailing behemoth launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. EC2 is a Web service that hosts business software applications. Then Red Hat tapped into the cloud last November with a beta version of its Enterprise Linux operating system on EC2. Now Amazon is expanding the cloud.
On Thursday, Amazon announced a new service that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data  to customers worldwide, using low latency and high data-transfer rates. Using a global network , Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said the new service can deliver data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.
"This is an important first step in expanding the cloud to give developers even more control over how their applications and their data are served by the cloud," Vogels said in his blog. "The service is currently in private beta, but we expect to have the service widely available before the end of the year."
Lofty Goals
Amazon's CDN does not yet have a name, but the company is promising businesses can distribute popular publicly readable content to customers all over the world. Amazon has four stated goals for the new service.
The first goal is to allow developers and businesses to get started with content delivery without any dollar or volume commitments.
The second goal is ease of use. Amazon said only one API is needed to get started with content delivery.
Amazon's third goal was to develop a CDN that works with Amazon S3 so businesses can feel secure about data storage . S3 is storage for the Internet that's designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers.
Finally, Amazon wants to give businesses the ability to deliver content to the most appropriate locations.
"You will start by storing your content in an Amazon S3 bucket and then marking the content as publicly readable. Next you'll make a single API call to register the bucket," explained Jeff Barr, a senior evangelist for Amazon Web Services, on the Amazon Web Services Blog. (continued...)
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