The idea is to provide publicly readable content to the customers worldwide, with low latency and high data transfer rates.(General [...]]]> As a logical extension to their existing product suite of EC2 cloud computing service and S3 online storage solution, Amazon is planning to launch a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) in near future. (Before dec 2008).

The idea is to provide publicly readable content to the customers worldwide, with low latency and high data transfer rates.
(General feature of all CDN)

It has been mentioned in the announcement that customers using Amazon S3 Bucket (Online Storage solution) will be easily able to migrate to Amazon CDN immediately by using the domain name/API provided.

As per ReadWriteWeb’s review, this service will not require a contract and also will not have any minimum-usage requirements unlike to Amazon’s other Web Services.

Looking at Amazon’s current links, its apparent that they already have presence in Germany, Japan, France and UK apart from USA.

It’s just matter of time for them to establish presence at another locations and start syncing their current applications + content across globe.

Another idea in future:  (though I’m not sure about its technical feasibility)

Amazon may also go ahead and try to replicate the certain EC2 applications + Databases (with master to master replications) across globe to enhance CDN concept to entire Applications/Cloud.

Idea is to even direct the user requests to nearest possible Cloud Instance which is already in sync with global.

(It’s not easy task and applications + db need to be designed in this manner…. neverthless it is not impossible in future..)

GigaOm, interestingly indicates that this move by Amazon, looks like a preemptive move, as New-York based company Voxel just announced CDN solution based on S3.

In my personal opinion is S3 or EC2 looks cost effective for less traffic services as they charge Fixed + Variable costs (based on the generated calls to content).
So if your number of server calls increase; the costs also tend to increase in the longer run.

And importantly it looks good till the time you notice that Amazon do not promise any uptime.

(Recent downtime of S3 and EC2 confirms that)

Still it is worthwhile to look/wait for the Amazon CDN.