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."
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