New edge routing service for Amazon S3

Amazon have launched Amazon Cloudfront today with an announcment on their blog as a service to layer on top of S3. Cloudfront allows you to serve content through Amazon’s edge cache which is located around the world in key locations. When you request content through the assigned domain name, it automatically routes you to the physically closest location to retrieve content. If the content is not yet there, Cloudfront will fetch it from S3 and cache it.

One of the most important services this provides is Asian based distribution points for content on S3; previously only available in Europe or USA. This should increase uptake of AWS in Asia, and with a larger uptake hopefully Amazon will look to make other services worldwide such as DevPay and mechanical Turk (currently only available in the USA).

For a full description including the list of locations Cloudfront distributes through take a look at the detailed description on the official Cloudfront page.