A year or so ago I had a client with the need to serve reasonably high-demand video from their website. They had a multitude of videos advertised on the front page of their website and they were driving traffic to the site with ads in primetime television, so we estimated that we could be looking at bandwidth spikes of something in the range of 10-14mbps — nothing groundbreaking, but certainly enough to hose our dedicated box and annoy our hosting company. So we decided to go with the CDN solution our hosting company already offered and ended up paying through the nose. It ended up costing something like 300% of the monthly cost of the dedi box just to leave it running, and even though we passed that on to our client, the charges felt pretty steep.

If Amazon Cloudfront had existed back then, we would’ve been in business at an insanely lower cost — something like less than 1% of what it cost us to go through our large, nationally established hosting company’s CDN. Amazon has been bumping up their Amazon Web Services offerings with bigger and badder options, to the point where they now offer commodity-priced, enterprise-scale paygo computing, storage, and db options for ludicrously tiny amounts of cash. Recently, the NYTimes converted 4TB of TIFF files (scans of archived articles) into PDFs in 24 hours using a cluster of 100 Amazon EC2 machines. That was every NYTimes article from 1851-1922, and it cost them less than $100. CloudFront will bring a similar scale of holyshit computing power to content delivery:

Amazon CloudFront delivers your content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Amazon CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which durably stores the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront – you pay only for as much or as little content as you actually deliver through the service.

Pricing starts at $0.17/GB for edge transfers in the US and $0.21 and $0.22 in Hong Kong and Japan respectively. That’s a tiny amount of money to pay to see one of the last barriers-to-entry of large-scale projects fall, and it’s pretty amazing to see how low that barrier is now. If I worked for Akamai, I’d probably be getting a bit nervous now.