Amazon Brings PayGo Pricing To Content Delivery

Amazon's pulls back the curtain on another component of its increasingly broad cloud computing services with the beta release of the CloudFront CDN. Content delivery networks are hardly new, but CloudFront's accessible pricing structure makes it particularly appealing to growing businesses that can't or won't enter into long-term contracts.For business owners and IT leaders in smaller, resource-strapped organizations what's exciting about CloudFront is not the low-latency it offers for content distribution. Nor is it the high data transfer speeds. It's nice that it works seamlessly with S3 and other Amazon Web Services, but that's not the real story either. It's the pricing.

For growing companies that need to deliver content (be it games, product photos, or whatever), entering into long-term contracts with Akamai or Limelight -- and even then not getting the favorable pricing that enterprises enjoyed -- can tie up scarce resources and limit flexibility to respond to market shifts. CloudFront's pricing structure provides exactly the type of playfield leveling that technology in general and cloud computing in particular can offer growing companies. Self-service (low barrier to entry) and PayGo pricing (so you only buy what you need. No more, no less). Not to fear, if you want the traditional enterprise consultant treatment to help you into Amazon's cloud, Capgemini is ready and willing to cash your check.

ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois said of the announcement:

"With this new service, Amazon is going up against a number of established companies, including Akamai and Limelight, which are almost synonymous with content delivery  Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery."

Amazon's retail DNA has, yet again, led the Bezos brigade to position an offering that soothes a customer pain point (and one that's grown more acute with the financial crisis). As Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services, said in his boilerplate boosterism of the CloudFront release:

"Our customers asked us for a way to globally distribute their most frequently accessed content with all the benefits that Amazon Web Services provides -- low, pay-as-you-go pricing, high performance, and reliability. Amazon CloudFront provides low latency, inexpensive content delivery and simple integration with Amazon S3 -- without complex sales negotiations or up-front commitments."

There's an argument to be made that the CloudFront announcement is a non-event for CDN market share leader, Akamai, with its 60% or 80% of the market (depending upon which study you believe), and other contenders such as Limelight Networks (10% or 25% market share) and CDNetworks -- the markets they serve are fundamentally different from the enormity of the fragmented small and midsize market Amazon's now poised to grab.

Check out the beta by clicking that oh-so-familiar Amazon "buy" button.