Distribute Your Content With Amazon CloudFront

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/distribute-your-content-with-amazon-cloudfront.html

by jeffbarr • 18 years ago

54 38 18 years ago

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EastSmith• 18 years ago

Just read the docs, it seems that when you put a file in the CDN they distribute it on all edge servers and you paid for that (which is normal). But it would be great if you can chose on which servers you want the files distributed to. For example I might need the servers just from the european region.

If you have couple of files in the CDN it will not make sense, because the cost to distribute the files around will be marginal, but if you have many GB of data, distributing them to all unneeded servers might be not cost efficient.

jeffbarr• 18 years ago

CloudFront uses a pull model, not a push model. When a particular node needs the data and doesn't have it cached, the node fetches the data from S3.

WestSorkin• 18 years ago

Aha, 10x!

lennysan• 18 years ago

Love the fact that you guys added the service to the Service Health Dashboard immediately: http://www.transparentuptime.com/2008/11/amazon-launches-fes...

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

Amazon is a bad-ass.

alecco4• 18 years ago

They are doing a fine job, yep.

Something I couldn't find is support for SSL. That's key for CDN services.

rmaccloy3• 18 years ago

Is it? Most of the use cases I can think of don't require SSL at all.

FWIW, I always found dealing with Akamai and HTTPS a bear.

briansmith3• 18 years ago

Signing up for a SSL certificate using your own credentials and then letting a third-party distribute and use your private key on an arbitrary number of systems you have no control over is bordering on fraud.

aniketh• 18 years ago

from the pricing table, I noticed that the cost in Japan was the highest. I always thought that Japan had a lot of bandwidth.

rmaccloy3• 18 years ago

Space + power? Also, AU and SE Asia will be routing to HK or Japan, and that would tend to be more expensive.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

OK, dumb question, but I thought there was this thing called Apache HTTPD that was traditionally used for serving static content? What ever happened to that? Granted, it has one basic flaw, in that it doesn't deliver usage statistics of my site to Amazon, but other than that?

rmaccloy3• 18 years ago

Serving static content from Apache or lighttpd is trivial.

Putting multiple boxes hosting that httpd in various geolocations, setting up DNS and BGP to route users optimally, designing failover routes and keeping N nodes in sync is the hard part.

Tichy3• 18 years ago

True, but when does one reach a size (user base) at which stuff like that becomes critical?

mdasen• 18 years ago

Has anyone noticed that the transfer charges for the United States are actually less than the charges for S3 once you get over 10TB? Other than the added cost of distributing the files to the CDN, wouldn't that make the CDN as cheap or cheaper than S3? Great place to put your most accessed files.

wmf2• 18 years ago

That's kinda the point. Since bits from a CDN travel less distance, Amazon charges less.

ryanmahoski2• 18 years ago

I'm seeing 38% faster downloads from Phoenix (nearest CloudFront edge: L.A.). I ran 5 trials on a 178MB video hosted on S3 [1] and CloudFront [2]. The S3 GETs took: 6m02s, 1m50s, -failed after 28MB- , 2m01s, 2m04s. The CloudFront GETs took: 3m40s, 1m10s, 1m23s, 2m05s, 1m25s. Ignoring the failed S3 run, we can compare average client latency: 2m59s vs 1m50s.

[1] http://2008.s3.amazonaws.com/09/javascript.mp4

[2] http://d11tgpuxrsgxu4.cloudfront.net/09/javascript.mp4

tlrobinson5• 18 years ago

Surprisingly CloudFront was almost twice as slow as S3 for me (though I only tried it once):

[1] 6m 56s

[2] 11m 22s

ryanmahoski2• 18 years ago

Yes that is interesting without being shocking. True we can't conclude anything from one spin so if you have time please run it again and share. If it was an anomaly then I think it's: a) merely verification that the pipes downstream are unreliable and/or b) your edge location didn't have the file cached so fetched from S3 before serving to you. But if you continue to see unexpected results do tell.

tlrobinson5• 18 years ago

This is general CDN question: how does one enable compression for CDN-served resources?

In Apache I just enable mod_deflate or mod_gzip, or serve up a .gz and set the Content-Encoding to gzip.

Do CDNs offer this somehow?

Can I set arbitrary headers like Content-Encoding?

Also, does anyone have stats on which browsers support deflate and gzip encodings? I imagine the vast majority at this point do.

crabapple• 18 years ago

the point of a cdn is to give you an SLA and honor it. how they configure their delivery platform should be opaque to you, its not like you are going to be getting a shell on the cdn machines anyway

tlrobinson5• 18 years ago

So can someone else answer my question then? If I want my content gzip encoded are CDNs simply not an option?

RyanGWU82• 18 years ago

With Amazon S3, you can set the Content-Encoding header to enable gzip. Here's a tutorial: http://devblog.famundo.com/articles/2007/03/02/serving-compr...

I'm not sure yet whether you can do that with CloudFront.

lux• 18 years ago

I wonder how this compares to Mosso's CloudFiles? They've already been offering a CDN built-in, but I haven't done any testing myself yet to compare their services (latency, etc).

Cost comparisons run very close using their cost calculators for just CloudFiles vs S3...

edjy• 18 years ago

Mosso's Cloud Files uses Limelight Networks' system. It's not a one-off with Limelight either, it's the same CDN service any of their customers use.

In addition to ReST, PHP, Python, Java, and C# API's, there is also a web-interface that makes it easy to sign-up, upload content, and CDN-enable it.

xal• 18 years ago

Are there any guarantees on how fast files are invalidated on the edge servers? Running curl on those urls gives a lot of insight ( X-Cache: MISS ... ) into what's going on but it seems that invalidation of resources take 10-15 seconds. The X-Cache changes immediately but you only get a miss after a while. At least that's what I've been seeing in my pretty trivial tests.

wensing• 18 years ago

Can't wait to start using this for Stormpulse. Our traffic is extremely geo-specific (usually Texas and/or Florida), so this is going to help.

To be frank, I haven't been completely satisfied with S3, so maybe this will help insulate us from those outages as well, assuming the content is already cached at the edge.

Distribute Your Content With Amazon CloudFront

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