Roundup: Amazon's CloudFront CDN

Dan Rayburn notes widespread analysis that Amazon's entry into the CDN market is trouble for Akamai and Limelight. "This assumption could not be further from the truth and people should look at the facts of what the Amazon service is and how that compares to Akamai or Limelight," Dan writes. "This is a great service for smaller customers who have very specific needs but it won’t challenge any of the major CDNs for years to come." Dan notes that Amazon is using Limelight for its own video on demand service.

How can smaller customers use the service? Amit Agarwal offers an excellent step-by-step guide to implementing CloudFront as a CDN, complete with diagrams.

Stacey at GigaOm notes that Amazon's pricing may mean trouble for new CDNs whose selling point has been cheaper rates than Akamai. "With prices ranging from 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes sent out a month, to 9 cents per GB for everything over 150 TB, the service seems to undercut the pricing offered by other CDNs for small to medium sized customers," she writes."

Larry Dignan at ZDNet says that pricing will have an impact. "Amazon is accelerating the commoditization of content delivery services," Larry writes. "These services are increasingly being bundled into other higher-end offerings anyway."