Amazon Web Services Takes CloudFront Out of Beta

Amazon CloudFront, the content delivery network for IaaS provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), had upheld the proud cloud tradition of an extended (paid) beta ahead of its official release. But now, CloudFront is generally available to all customers, with new support for any origin server and a new SLA guaranteeing 99.9% availability. That’s quite a lot of jargon. Read on to make sense of it all.

During its public beta phase, Amazon CloudFront was only designed to work with the Amazon S3 storage platform. But now, administrators can specify any other origin server — a useful tool, Amazon says, for customers with custom content servers or who want to do object manipulation like inserting ads on their end. And naturally, AWS says that CloudFront was designed for S3 (Simple Storage Service) and recommends it in most use-cases.

As for the service level agreement (SLA), Amazon Web Services is now offering customers service credits if CloudFront availability drops below that 99.9% guarantee, which should give VARs and their customers peace of mind.

CloudFront is no stranger to updates. But serious cloud offerings have SLAs and a certain level of service portability. With this move, Amazon Web Services solidifies CloudFront as a serious cloud offering, The VAR Guy believes.

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