Andrew Powell

Recently, I've been playing around with ideas of how to improve site performance.  One of the things we've done in the past, to improve performance, is move all static content to a separate server, on the same network, so that your application server (ColdFusion, etc) is focused on only processing your application pages.  All static content is served from the "static" server and can be configured with things like content expiration and caching to help speed up site loading.  Recently, however, Amazon has made great strides with their Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform.  More directly, they have introduced CloudFront which can distribute your content to their edge servers from a S3 bucket.  What does this really mean for you?  Well, much like Akamai, CloudFront makes sure that your users are pulling the content from the server that is closest to them.  CloudFront uses the following edge locations:

United States

• Ashburn, VA
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Newark, NJ
• Palo Alto, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Louis, MO

Europe

• Amsterdam
• Frankfurt
• Dublin
• London

Asia

• Hong Kong
• Tokyo

So, no matter where your users are, there is probably a CloudFront location near them, which means faster content delivery.

Getting your content up on CloudFront is pretty easy too.  You can use the Manager For Amazon CloudFront to help you create CloudFront distributions from your S3 buckets.  Just a note, there are CloudFront limits you to 1,000 Mb per second of transfer and 1,000 GET requests per second.  If you expect your application to go over that, then you've got a pretty popular application, but Amazon can accommodate you.  

So, what is the difference between S3 and CloudFront?  S3 sets you up in one of two locations:  United States or Europe.  CloudFront distributes your content to edge servers around the world.  While S3 is fast, it is not as distributed as CloudFront.  I have, recently, switched all the static assets of this site to be hosted on CloudFront.  Take a look at the activity when you load this site and you will see a dearth of images coming down from "static.infoaccelerator.net", which is my CNAME to my CloudFront distribution.  

CloudFront is a very cost effective and reliable way to help improve the performance of your web applications.  It scales itself for you, and, it costs less than a new server to deploy.  If you're looking for a low-cost, fast and reliable hosting provider for static content, go take a look at CloudFront.