Comments on: Amazon S3 as a CDN?

By: Homer

Homer — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:47:47 +0000

Amazon is building a CDN.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/html-forms-controller/aws-content-delivery-service

By: Leda Yeats

Leda Yeats — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:03:05 +0000

Amazon? Infrastructure? Started with books. Soon added CDs & DVDs. Toys R Us, Borders, Target. zShops, Marketplace, E-Commerce API People building their businesses on Amazon is cool. What else do we have lurking in the corners? 8 I’m not totally sure how Amazon came up with AWS, but I’ll bet it went something like this. It sure makes sense that they began to like having businesses building on top of them and their expertise. And I don’t buy the argument that this is silly because Amazon’s a bookseller. What a dumb argument. In reality, Amazon’s ﬁnding ways to monetize other things they do well. More businesses should do this.

By: Andrey

Andrey — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:44:31 +0000

Hey, good idea.
I just don’t understand about specifying “Origin Server URL”. Am i understand you correct, you are specify it somewhere in the bucket? or its some property on the file that you uploading?
Can you tell me more detail how to adjust my S3 bucket so he can check for the newer version first.
Another question. Does its means the server checking for the version every time when the request coming? In this case its pointless to put it to the S3 if your origin server will always get version validation messages. Don’t you think so?

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:34:49 +0000

This sounds like you want a version control system, as Ewan says keep use your host as a broker and ensure your application points to the latest version of the asset. This will give you total control over whats served from the cache and also permit you to transparently change caching services should you require. Also any need for requests to be transacted between S3 and your site will have a cost in terms of performance and unless they live close together you may well outweigh the benefit of the caching infrastructure, unless of course its the bandwidth your worried about and not the performance.

Systems I am involved in have a file versioning approach where the origin server contains a copy of all versions of a file, new ones are pushed there and front facing references to assets are update when a new version comes along. You could then go back and clean up any old versions on the cache to reduce your storage costs.

Caching or CDNs, particularly where you can locate your cache geographically close to your end user are essential for any large scale web application.

By: Ewan Makepeace

Ewan Makepeace — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:21:27 +0000

Can you not do this in reverse?

1. Your server handles all requests.
2. All resource requests are actually filled from Amazon – your server is just handling the redirection.
3. Where a resource is out of date on Amazon your server would upload it first to Amazon and then return a reference to the uploaded object.
[If this imposes too long a delay you could serve it directlty from your server but that breaks the model.]

If your server is not serving content but just redirecting links it should be able to handle high volumes?

Ewan