Amazon Launches CDN As It Enters A Highly Competitive Field

This was to be expected after Amazon’s (NSDQ: AMZN) S3 storage service and EC2 on-demand computing service already leading the way in cloud computing. Now it is launching a content delivery network later this year, that will take on the likes of big incumbents like Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM) and *Limelight* and also the slew of starts that have gotten funding over the last two years. As to what differentiation the book giant will have besides the big network, it is going to be charging its customers on usage instead of the long-term contracts current players foist on their clients, as Om explains here. There will be no long term contracts and it will publish the prices online, something of a rarity in the famously-obtuse sector. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels also explains the service on his blog here.

Dan Rayburn: When released, the yet to be named product offering will offer HTTP only delivery for objects, both video and non-video related. The offering won’t support streaming, live broadcasting, or provide many of the other products and services that video content owners need. While those are potential features that Amazon may offer down the road, they real story here is that Amazon is going to offer a high performance method of distributing content with low latency and high data transfer rates.