Amazon Web Services Adds Features To Deliver Dynamic Content

Amazon CloudFront, a web service for content delivery, integrates with other Amazon Web Services to allow businesses and developers to distribute content to end users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.

With the new features, users can access their own dynamic content so that applications can run faster and be more responsive, Amazon said.

[Related: 10 More Hot Products From Interop 2012 ]

“We've put together a long list of optimizations that will each increase the performance of your application on their own, but will work even better when you use them in conjunction with other AWS services such as Route 53, Amazon S3, and Amazon EC2,” Amazon Web Services said in a blog.

In the past, Amazon had partnered with content delivery companies such as Akamai to enable such services.

An Amazon partner said the new CDN feature will serve a need for users to move beyond delivering static content.

“It’s a nice service. It (CloudFront) started out as a way to deliver static images, like CSS, or image files, anything that doesn’t change from day to day,” said Kevin Chu, director of systems and infrastructure at Digitaria, a JWT company based in San Diego, Calif. “Now it serves static and dynamic content like streaming. This brings them another step closer to Akamai or Limelight, or any of the services that offer CDNs.”

Al Hilwa, program director for applications development software with IDC, agreed.

"They (Amazon Web Services) host so many content providers and distributors like Netflix and others that it makes perfect sense to do this," Hilwa said. "CDNs are about efficiency of content delivery and placing the functionality close to where the content is stored is even more synergy.