More practical Amazon Web Services

Today, I received an AWS email list. Following web services such as EC2, S3, simpledb, and SQS, Amazon launched the content delivery service cloudfront beta2.

If EC2 solves the computing power problem and S3 solves the storage problem, cloudfront solves the global distribution problem. In the Internet era, the Earth is not smooth, and it is all tied to those submarine cables. The speed of accessing web sites in other countries or regions is still unsatisfactory in many cases. From the perspective of site service providers, your users may give up because of slow access. China has a notorious "North-South interconnectivity" problem. Why are there no interconnectivity problems between countries and regions. This is why CDN (Content Delivery Network) services appear.

Cloudfront can be understood as a CDN, but it is more flexible in terms of cost. Generally, the CDN service is rented in a fixed bandwidth (for example, 10 m and 100 m), while cloudfront is charged based on the actually distributed content traffic.

According to the introduction on the AWS website, Amazon has established edge locations in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan. These release points can basically meet the needs of the world (or, not in China) quick access. You only need to call a cloudfront Web Service API to describe what content you want to distribute (a webpage, a piece of music or video, as long as it is a resource that can be accessed through HTTP ), cf returns a URL. When a user accesses your page, CF forwards the request to the edge location nearest to the user (which is actually the fastest access speed) based on the user's region, in theory, users should be able to get faster access speeds. Like CDN, CF is mainly used to support static content. You can run dynamic services on EC2 and S3, and just deliver static content to CF.

I have always liked AWS. Compared with gae, it may be too low-level, but more flexible. For commercial operation services, the price is even more trustworthy. AWS charges fees based on the "usage and receipt" method, and Amazon's many years of experience and accumulation in operating large-scale services ensure that some Internet service providers have a headache, start to figure out how to provide competitive products.

Last week, I heard a speech from 21 vianet saying they are also working on a virtual machine-based Elastic leasing solution. I asked: What is the comparison with AWS? The other party did not make a positive response, but it clearly indicated that there is still a big gap. Ice freezing is not a day's cold, but I also saw domestic companies seeing crisis and catching up. Thanks to GFW and market access, for them, the impact of AWS is not that great, but the competition in the domestic market is not optimistic. After the financial storm, "Winter Theory" swept the Internet industry. In this case, it is wise to create an elastic Leasing Service.

 

Update: at this year's SD 2.0 conference, Jeff Barr from Amazon will explain Amazon Web Services. Speaking of this Jeff Barr, it is also a great guy. I have worked at Microsoft and started a consulting company by myself, and the customers are all famous. He has been working on AWS for several years in Amazon. It is very suitable for him to explain AWS. Ah, SD 2.0 conference. Come on. You can't wait to hear Jeff Barr's course.