What is it?
From the Amazon blurb:
Amazon CloudFront is a web service that gives businesses and software developers an easy and cost effective way to distribute popular content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Like all AWS Infrastructure Services, Amazon CloudFront is a self-service, pay-per-use offering, requiring no long term commitments or minimum fees. With CloudFront, your files are delivered to end-users using a global network of edge locations. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files.
How does it work?
The CloudFront service is backed by usage of S3. You store your content in an S3 bucket and register the bucket with the CloudFront service. This creates a 'distribution' of the content you have registered. A distribution has a unique domain name associated with it you can access your cached content - you can also map your own name to this via a CNAME record.
When users request content via this distribution, they will be automatically routed to the nearest Edge location to retrieve the content.
The API
As with the other AWS tools then you will need to add it to your account.
The Getting Started Guide and Developer Guide give you all the details you need to use the service via the API.


4 comments
Comment on Amazon launches their CDN - CloudFront by wiktor
November 24th, 2008 @ 16:11 – permalink
Comment on Amazon launches their CDN - CloudFront by Rails LearnHub
December 3rd, 2008 @ 22:31 – permalink
Comment on Amazon launches their CDN - CloudFront by Chris Anderton
December 4th, 2008 @ 12:49 – permalink
Comment on Amazon launches their CDN - CloudFront by Andy
February 23rd, 2009 @ 18:27 – permalink
Leave a reply
You can use Markdown in your comment as well as plain HTML. You can use
<filter:jscode lang="ruby">and</filter:jscode>tags to surround code blocks (supported languages are css, html, javascript and ruby). Your email address will not be published.If your comment doesn’t appear immediately after posting it could have been marked as spam. Don’t worry: we regularly check for and approve incorrectly filtered comments so you shouldn’t have to wait too long for it to be shown.