Amazon has unveiled a new web content delivery service named Amazon CloudFront.

The service could prove useful in improving the performance of a website by giving developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments - the same as the benefits of using a content delivery network (CDN).

Amazon CloudFront delivers content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for objects (files) are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. Using a content delivery network results in low latency and higher data transfer speeds overall, but only until recently has such an opportunity been available on such a scale.

CloudFront works with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the original, definitive versions of your files. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no contracts or monthly commitments for using Amazon CloudFront. Users pay for as much or as little content as is actually delivered through the service.

Amazon has even made an Amazon CloudFront manager available. The application will come in handy for S3 users as they upload files to to the AS3 network and sitribute them through CloudFront. Pricing (seen below) seems reasonable.

Data Transfer
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.120 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.090 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Requests
$0.010 per 10,000 GET requests