Amazon Will Launch ‘Local’ Content Delivery Network

September 19th, 2008

Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It’s another step toward cloud computing, and it will be available later this year.Amazon is no stranger to the cloud. The retailing behemoth launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. EC2 is a Web service that hosts business software applications. Then Red Hat tapped into the cloud last November with a beta version of its Enterprise Linux operating system on EC2. Now Amazon is expanding the cloud.

On Thursday, Amazon announced a new service that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data to customers worldwide, using low latency and high data-transfer rates. Using a global network, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said the new service can deliver data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.

“This is an important first step in expanding the cloud to give developers even more control over how their applications and their data are served by the cloud,” Vogels said in his blog. “The service is currently in private beta, but we expect to have the service widely available before the end of the year.”

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