Above The Cloud

One of the services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Amazon CloudFront network. This is a pay-as-you-go service for distributing content world wide. The great thing about this service is that it operates under a pattern known as ‘Edge Services’, which means that your data is distributed to clients from a decentralized location. In other words, each client will hit a data store closer to them, much the same way as ‘mirrors’ work. These ‘edges’ serve your content even though you store it in one place. Amazon CloudFront takes care of the propagation. In this case, you store your content in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

AWS has recently dropped pricing on their CloudFront services, as follows in a recent media release:

Effective February 1st, AWS has announced new pricing tiers for Amazon CloudFront, our high-performance, pay-as-you-go content delivery service. The new pricing tiers decrease the price of delivering content to as low as $0.05 per gigabyte delivered for high volume users. Find the new pricing tiers on the CloudFront detail page.