Cloudfront is Simply Marvelous
How big of a difference does Cloudfront make? I have been slowly transitioning more and more of our services to the Amazon Cloud with S3 and SimpleDB. We had a particularly busy weekend last week (which will continue to increase for the next couple of months) and our server started to whine a little bit.
So I transferred some of our static content like javascript, images, and stylesheets over to S3. We already hosted videos and photos on S3 and it had done well. That allieviated the server somewhat, but I got curious about what difference CloudFront would make. So I enabled it and WOW.
The benchmarks I ran had S3 about twice as slow as serving it from our server. Not good. But then looking at CloudFront and it was 14x faster than on our server and 34x faster than regular S3!!! For my CSS file that was .25 seconds from S3, .14 seconds from our server, and .0073 from CloudFront! And I should note that our server is hosted in Orlando where I also live, so our server is probably faster for me than for many. But CloudFront makes it look like it's standing still.
Great job Amazon! I'm sold and will be sending more and more that direction.
Follow-Up Post: CloudFront is Still 34x Faster than S3 Alone
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