Amazon's CloudFront for Content

Content delivery is a pretty cool area. Akamai, which was founded by three MIT profs with the help of a handful of equally brilliant students, was a pioneer in the field.

Now Amazon wants to harness its massive network to help high-volume Web sites deliver content faster. The new service, CloudFront, is an add-on to its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and moves bandwidth-intensive items such as video closer the ultimate consumer.

Right now there are only three edges supported, but as more customers come on board, I'm sure more cache location will be established.

Here's a side note on Akamai: Daniel L. Lewin (not to be confused with Dan'l Lewin -- a former Apple exec now with Microsoft), helped found the Internet content caching and distribution company, where he served as CTO. Shortly before 9/11, Akamai went public and all three founders became worth more than a billion dollars a piece. Lewin did't sail off into the sunset, but instead buckled down to move Akamai ahead. So it was he who found himself on a business trip, sitting on American Airlines Flight 11 from Logan Airport in Boston to LAX. His plane was taken over by scum and flown into one of the Twin Towers. Evidence indicates that Lewin, a highly trained former Israeli security official, was killed trying to stop the hijackers. 

Posted by Doug Barney on 11/30/2010 at 12:47 PM