Nihar Bihani, AWS Senior Product Manager, discussed CloudFront, one of the Amazon services, with theCube host Jeff Frick, live at the Amazon AWS 2013 Summit. Offering an overview of what CloudFront is, Bihani described it as a content delivery service that provides customers with “an easy way to deliver their content globally,”  and that integrates well with other AWS services to make delivery even faster.

Why Amazon’s CDN?

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Asked how AWS came to the decision it needed to add a CDN to their offering, Bihani explained it all started “because of a usage pattern that we noticed.” When S3 was launched, a lot of customers were using it as a CDN. That led to the concludion that “there must be a latent need in the market for the content delivery space”.  Following the S3 model, AWS offered self-service delivery at low prices.

“We started out with a minimum viable offering” when CloudFront was launched in 2008, and now it offers live and on demand streaming, HTTPS delivery and private content.

“We listen to customers, understand what they need,” and then develop it and launch it, Bihani said.  CloudFront has been continuously innovating over the past 4.5 years and prioritized feature development based on customer feedback.

CloudFront added self-service capabilities, and a low cost, pay-as-you-go option to the existing CDN market. Traditional CDNs required paying a premium to start using the product, and then negotiating a long term contract.

Exploring use cases, Bihani stated that CloudFront now supports the delivery of dynamic content, such as weather data. The WeatherBug application uses CloudFront to deliver dynamic and static content and what they really like is the ease of use. “CloudFront was super easy to configure,” they did not need to write any custom code.

“Our customers are very vocal, they tell us exactly what they want,” Bihani added. “They tell us when they want us to bundle services together.” CloudFront uses this feedback to come up with innovative solutions for customer problems. Highlighting other innovative uses of CloudFront, Bihani mentioned whole site delivery – using the service to deliver both static and dynamic content, and livestreaming – a feature added over the past year – allowing customers to deliver live feeds across the world.

An evolving CDN economy

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Speaking of CDN’s economy changing, Bihani said that CloudFront has been adding features over the years, without adding to the price. It is adding premium features and democratizing their usage, by allowing customers to take advantage of their affordability.

When it comes to future innovation and development, CloudFront focuses on three specific areas – adding more features –  the team asks customers what features are more important to them and then develops them – price – the main goal being to lower prices – and adding more locations – there are 39 today and more will be added.