New Amazon Cloudfront: Solution to Launch Server Meltdowns?
Amazon has released a public beta of a new service called CloudFront. It works with their Amazon S3 service to distribute web content geographically so that your files are closer to your visitors.
I think this may be the solution to the server meltdowns we have seen or experienced first-hand during big product launches. I know several big-name marketers who have had server issues recently. These aren’t rookies. They’ve bought multiple servers to handle the anticipated load, but had big problems anyway. It’s a tough challenge.
With CloudFront, your files are hosted on the massive Amazon network. In the US alone there are eight geographically disbursed “edge” locations. If your web page starts getting lots of requests, as it will during a big launch, CloudFront takes your files from the S3 server and pushes them out to its edge servers in these eight locations. This means there is less “travel time” for the files to get to the visitor, and that the demand is shared among those server locations.
Result? Your sales page stays up and orders keep coming in.
What kind of capacity can it handle?
From the web site: “By default, your distributions support peak data transfer speeds of 1,000 megabits per second and peak request rates of 1,000 requests per second. If you expect more than this amount of traffic, please request a higher limit here. ”
Pricing is based on what you use – not upfront fees or monthly charges.
http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
Thoughts?
November 26th, 2008 at 10:18 am
I’ve been having great results with CloudFront for hosting my videos used in advertisements. I think that’s the killer right there, big launches are increasingly using large videos that eat up the bandwidth and http processes. By offloading it you only have to worry about serving up the dynamic content. And it’s also much cheaper than getting additional servers as you only pay for what you use!