Amazon today announced a new service, Amazon CloudFront, that promises to speed up your site. 

It’s a simple pay-as-you-go content delivery network that offers to deliver your content to people, with Amazon-scale service, but without big upfront costs. 

Amazon has a network of “edge” network locations that it can automatically distribute your content to. These “edge” locations are data hubs placed at optimal locations on the Internet in order to minimize the network latency and speed when serving up web content. 

CloudFront has locations around the world:

 

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

 

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Content delivery services are used by most major sites because they speed up users’ experience by getting the content closer to the user. Web pages and media files from these big sites loads quickly because the content is located as close to the user as possible on the Internet. 

At this point, Amazon’s service is likely to bring content delivery services to sites that have the resources to build custom solutions based on CloudFront.

However, it’s likely that plug-ins will be developed for major blogging platforms, like WordPress and Movable Type, that will automatically tap into CloudFront. When this happens, it should be easy for high volume blogs, podcasts and video podcasts to take advantage of the benefits offered by content delivery networks.