Marketeer Amazon has added a content delivery service to its Web Services business unit. Cloudfront, as the new service has been called, caches content on Amazon's servers spread around the globe and delivers content from the server located closest to a user.

Companies with resource-hungry content, such as Youtube and Myspace, use such services to make sure people surfing their sites don't have to wait until the kettle is piping to listen to music or watch videos. Clients can easily add content to their account by uploading an object to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Objects stored in an S3 bucket can be registered for Cloudfront and are than cached on servers throughout Amazon's network.

Amazon gave a company named Playfish as an example. Playfish uses Cloudfront to distribute its social games. “We’ve grown very rapidly to over 25 million registered players and we now serve over two billion minutes of game play every month,” said Sami Lababidi, some guy working at Playfish. “Cloudfront has reduced the time it takes for any customer, wherever they are, to access our games through Cloudfront’s fast download speeds. AWS also allows us to stay flexible as we grow and only pay for what we actually use without any long-term contracts or usage commitments.”

All that sounds nice and sensible and is bound to get Akamai's spinsters going.

Cloudfront can be used on a need-to-use basis, without any sort of binding long-term contracts and monthly subscription fees.

Pricing is available on the Cloudfront site, which can be found here. X