sorted by: recent | see : popular

Content Tagged with Akamai + Limelight

Today Amazon Web Services launched the beta version of its content delivery network service called CloudFront. As Om mentioned in September when the service was announced, this is a good move for Amazon, and something that may put the hurt on fellow CDNs such as Limelight and Akamai. Amazon will charge a usage-based fee, rather than a long-term contract, bringing CDN prices even lower for smaller web players who don’t have the scale to negotiate lower prices. Here’s how it works from the release:

The service caches copies of content close to end users for low latency delivery, while also providing fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to end users at scale. CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon S3, where users store the original versions of objects delivered through the service. Customers need only put their objects into an Amazon S3 bucket and then register that bucket with the new service using a simple API call, which then returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, explains all about CloudFront on his blog.

A content delivery service that would extend Amazon S3 has been something that is very high on the wish list of our customers. They were already successfully using Amazon S3 for some of their content distribution needs, but many wanted the choice to do so with even lower latency and with higher data transfer rates to any place in the world.

He goes on to explain:

Using Amazon CloudFront is dead simple. Many of our private beta customers have reported that it only took them 10-15 minutes from the moment that they first signed up for the service to the moment that Amazon CloudFront was distributing their content.

The second Amazon Web Services principle that sets Amazon CloudFront apart is that no upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. There are no upfront fees or high volume requirements and no negotiations are necessary because we have published low prices from the start.

The second point is the more disruptive one. When Amazon announced its CDN in September we wrote,

Akamai is less likely to be impacted in the near term, but it further commoditizes the CDN business and forces a big shakeout in the industry, taking down the small and the weak. Akamai has been focusing on value-add services, as a way to stay ahead of the commoditization of the basic CDN services.

With prices ranging from 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes sent out a month, to 9 cents per GB for everything over 150 TB, the service seems to undercut the pricing offered by other CDNs for small to medium sized customers. It might be a good thing that Akamai’s looking at diversifying into online advertising.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

Voxel, a New York-based startup, wants to upend the content delivery network business by offering an ultra low-cost service that rides on the back of Amazon’s S3 offering. It’s a move that is sure to further exacerbate the woes of the CDN business, which has already been wracked by price wars.

Raj Dutt, Voxel’s founder and CEO, has been fighting the odds since the day he started his company back in 1999. His idea of providing Linux-based app hosting was ahead of its time; it’s only recently that the world has started to come around to his way of thinking. Similarly, when everyone was jettisoning their fiber assets, Dutt’s company bulked up on dark fiber, becoming a major fiber and infrastructure owner in New York and New Jersey before expanding to San Jose, Palo Alto and other major Internet hubs. Now he’s betting big on offering low-priced CDN services — and effectively daring others in the space to compete.

“[The] hosting business has become commoditized and [the] same is going to happen to [the] CDN business,” says Dutt. “[What] we are trying to do is pretty much accelerate that.” While CDN providers may blanch, startups should take note, for this VoxCAST CDN could prove to be a money-saver for them. Why? Many of them are using S3 for content delivery and as a CDN replacement. While some would like to sign up for CDN services, they either can’t afford it or they’re turned off by the opaque nature of the CDN business. Most importantly, the CDN operators want to lock users into long-term contracts, something many startups are (understandably) reluctant to do.

Voxel thinks its new VoxCAST CDN is a better option. For S3 customers, such as Facebook app developers, for example, Voxel will pull content from Amazon’s S3, cache it on its edge devices and then serve it up from those devices. Since the company owns data centers and fiber in most major Internet hubs and has interconnection arrangements with many other carriers, it can deliver content cheaply. (See the Voxel web site for details on pricing and comparison with other services.)

Will this antagonize Amazon? Dutt doesn’t think so. “We think S3 is awesome, but it isn’t the best tool to deliver massive amounts of rich media,” he says. Will the idea work? Well it makes lot of sense. And the CDN business could use some transparency. If it does works, however, it won’t be such good news for the current crop of CDN players such as Limelight Networks, Akamai, Internap and Level 3 — not to mention all those startups just jumping into the CDN business.

---

Interested in web infrastructure? Check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

Content delivery network Limelight Networks’ shares surged nearly 20 percent Friday after saying it expects fourth-quarter revenue to come in at the high end of its previous guidance. The bad news is that the sales are estimated to range from $29.3 million to $30 million, essentially flat compared with the previous quarter.

Given that there’s a price war among the big CDNs, a war that last fall prompted Level 3 to announce it would take its CDN prices to about half the going rate, Limelight’s (LLNW) stable sales may be largely due to deep discounting. As Limelight spends about 60 cents on every $1 it earns just to provide service, whereas Akamai spends about 30 cents, I’m not sure how low Limelight can go. Or for how long.