I've Gone Cloud!

Thu, 16 Sep 2010

I've been using AWS (Amazon Web Services) for about 5 months now and I decided to upgrade my Amazon S3 account to the CloudFront. What CloudFront does is it distributes your content with the fastest/closest server towards the user. So if someone from Singapore visits my site, it will use a Singapore or Hong Kong server rather than a US server making the speed incredibly fast.

This is called a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. It is easy to tie into your Amazon account. The reason I went with Amazon rather than Rackspace for now is because of three reasons:

1. I already had Amazon S3 & integration is simple with CloudFront.
2. Amazon is cheaper
3. Amazon supports CNAME's (So I can get static.jream.com as my URL, rather then a long ugly URL)

So that's that, I recorded a video to explain it a bit better if you decide you want to do it yourself!