Amazon's new CDN

Amazon's new CDN is cheered on by their CTO Werner Vogels. The primary take-away from the post:

Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access.

Now, Amazon is only currently peering visibly with 4 other networks: Qwest, NTT, Tiscali, and Level3, which all seem to be transit providers.

Now I guess their edge routers don't absolutely need to sit in peered networks, but I'm sure it'll make the host networks happier [otherwise those host networks will be bearing the cost of reverse-proxying the traffic through their own transit connections].

The PeeringDB page for Amazon isn't that much more helpful - no public switching presence noted, but there is some promise shown in the following locations:

• Equinix Ashburn
• PAIX Palo Alto [incl. PacketExchange I guess]
• The Westin Building [Yay SIX! And PAIX Seattle too, I suppose]

Another development to watch closely. Amazon: where is your non-USA PoP presence? LINX and AMS-IX beckon...

Google local delays

So now SM of Google SA is promising better SA-local access to Google services by the end of 2008. Only a year after they promised it the last time:

[via mybroadband.co.za]

Masie said that by the end of 2008 services such as Google Search, Google Maps and Youtube would work a lot faster, better and quicker in South Africa.

Google SA have been quite coy in announcing anything about their local datacenter plans. Is this to avoid tipping their hand? Perhaps they'll extend their GGC 'CDN' to South Africa. This might be the best way to dip their toe in the waters and gauge local usage and interest, especially once mid-2009 rolls around and Seacom's better pricing comes online.

Facebook CDN

I don't know how this slipped through the cracks, but I've just noticed that Facebook has started hosting some content on static.ak.fbcdn.net [fbcdn presumably = facebook content distribution network]

Is Facebook planning on using multiple CDNs?

Both static.ak.fbcdn.net and static.ak.facebook.com seem to be hosted by Akamai, so for us "lucky" .ac.za we get routed through IS. This is actually good news, as we have a very high-speed connection to IS from TENET. Unfortunately, most institutions connect slowly into TENET (~30 Mbps for UCT!) and implement some shaping on popular websites. So we don't get most of the benefit.