Amazon Simple Storage Service goes local

Amazon is taking its Simple Storage Service worldwide

Developers delivering cloud applications through Amazon Web Services will soon be able to offer customers a better service.

The company is to extend the abilities of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to deliver a worldwide local content delivery service.

Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, explained in a blog post how delivering content to customers' applications locally will be more efficient and increase their satisfaction with cloud applications.

Businesses and/or developers will be able to deliver the same application performance to all customers, no matter what their location, he explained.

"The transport of network packets is still limited to the speed of light (at best) and customers of cloud applications may experience a different performance depending on where they are in relation to where the applications are running," said Vogels.

"We have seen that, for many applications, that works just fine, but there are developers who would like more control over how their customers are being served and for example would like to give all customers low latency access, regardless of their location."

The new service will allow developers and businesses to serve data to customers worldwide using a global network of edge locations, enabling low-latency and high data transfer rates, according to Vogels.

"The new service will deliver your content to your customers from the most appropriate location," he added.

Amazon had already been moving towards delivering such a service. The firm recently launched Amazon S3 in Europe to allow developers building applications to serve data to customers out of a European storage cloud.

Vogels suggested that the new initiative is simply taking Amazon S3 in Europe worldwide.

The company said that it had not yet decided on a name for the new service, referring to it in a separate blog entry as simply "a new service for content delivery".

An Amazon spokeswoman further expanded on the new services. "Many customers of Amazon Web Services currently use Amazon S3 for delivery of popular content - files that get downloaded frequently," she said.

"They asked us for a service that complemented Amazon S3's high durability storage with even higher performance delivery, by storing and delivering popular content from edge locations close to where their customers make requests."