Expanding the Cloud

For many the "Cloud" in Cloud Computing signifies the notion of location independence; that somewhere in the internet services are provided and that to access them you do not need any specific knowledge of where they are located. Many applications have already been built using cloud services and they indeed achieve this location transparency; their customers do not have to worry about where and how the application is being served.

However for developers to do their job properly the cloud cannot be fully transparent. As much as we would like to make it easy and simple for everyone, building high-performance and highly reliable applications in the cloud requires that the developers have more control. For example a reality is that failures can happen; servers can crash and networks can become disconnected. Even if these are only temporary glitches and are transient errors, the developer of applications in the cloud really wants to make sure his or her application can continue to serve customers even in the face of these rare glitches. A similar issue is that of network latency; as much as we would like to see the cloud to be transparent, the transport of network packets is still limited to the speed of light (at best) and customers of cloud applications may experience a different performance depending on where they are located in relation to where the applications are running. We have seen that for many applications that works just fine, but there are developers who would like more control over how their customers are being served and for example would like to give all their customers low latency access, regardless of their location.

At Amazon we have been building applications on these cloud principles for several years now and we are very much aware of the tools that developers need to build applications that are required to meet very high standards with respect to scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness. We are also listening very closely to the feedback AWS customers are giving us to make sure we expose the right tools for them to do their job. We launched Amazon S3 in Europe to ensure that developers could build applications that could serve data out of a European storage cloud. We launched Regions and Availability Zones (combined with Elastic IPs) for Amazon EC2 such that developers would have better control over where their applications would be running to ensure high-availability. We are now ready to expand the cloud even further and bring the cloud storage to its customers' doorstep.

Today we are announcing that we are expanding the cloud by adding a new service that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data to their customers world-wide, using low-latency and high data transfer rates. Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.

We have developed this content delivery service using the robust AWS principles we know work well for our customers:

• Cost-effective: no commitments and no minimum usage requirements. You only pay for what you use in a manner similar to the other Amazon Web Services.
• Simple to use: one API call gets you going. You store the data you want to distribute in an Amazon S3 bucket and you use this API call to register this bucket with the content distribution service. The registration will provide you with a new domain name that you can use in url's to access the data through this service with HTTP. When your customer accesses your content through your new url the data it refers to will be delivered through a network of edge servers.
• Works well with other services: The service integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 and the data/content served through the service can be accessed using the standard HTTP access techniques.
• Reliable: Amazon S3 will give you durable storage of your data, and the network of edge locations on three continents used by the new service will deliver your content to your customers from the most appropriate location.

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. The service is currently in private beta but we expect to have the service widely available before the end of the year. You can get a few more details and sign up to get notified when the service is becoming on this AWS page Also check Jeff Bar's posting on the AWS weblog.