Amazon CloudFront - Amazon CTO on their CDN launch

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/11/amazon_cloudfront.html

by don420 • 18 years ago

9 3 18 years ago

This is great news.

Can anyone explain the following:

Amazon CloudFront uses Amazon S3 as the origin server to store the original, definitive versions of your files. Normal fees will apply for Amazon S3 usage, including “origin fetches” – data transferred from Amazon S3 to edge locations.

I can't find any details about 'origin fetch' pricing on the S3?

e1ven• 18 years ago

The way it seems to work is that CloudFront caches files at their edge servers, and then serves them using the CF pricing- The content is loaded FROM S3, however.

Amazon then requests it from S3, so it can cache it. This means you need to pay for that download from S3, just like you would if a user downloaded it from home.

After this cached copy is stored, Amazon won't need to download it from S3 anymore, so you shouldn't get hit with that again, unless it expires from their servers somehow.

waynep• 18 years ago

I investigated this for serving up static content for my company. a couple things are wrong: 1) it doesn't serve up gzipped files to browsers that accept gzip, you have to manually manage this yourself 2) there's no way to force CF to reload from S3 so you have to resort to versioning by filename (styles.v1.css, styles.v2.css, etc)..

Otherwise for it's price, CF is a bargain for client-side performance minded startups.

Amazon CloudFront - Amazon CTO on their CDN launch

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