I really enjoyed listening to Dr. Werner Vogels. Dr. Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.
This vision is why I have moved to EC2/S3 in 2007. I guess, I’ve finally become an Amazon AWS fan boy.

Even if audio is a bit out of sync, it’s worth to listening this long session.
As a developer from the bottom of my heart I like especially this quote: “There is no value in being a system administrator. You do not build a better product by being a better server maintainer.” This is so true, but I wonder how EC2 can free me from typical administration tasks. I still have to maintain my virtual server instances with the whole LAMP stack. Plus I have to think about how to scale horizontally (what to do when I need more virtual server instances).
In contradiction to Amzon’s EC2, Google’s AppEngine promises to free me from doing the admin tasks (no OS/LAMP Stack to maintain) and to solve the scale problem (no Database Replication to set up). AppEngine scales out of the box – the downside is, that it offers a very limited runtime just for you app.
True, a single EC2 instance doesn’t scale out of the box but it also doesn’t limit you in doing what you want to do on your virtual server. With EC2 I have to solve the scaling on my own. For this price I got more freedom.
I’m exited to use and learn about EC2/S3/Storefront each day but I also hope that Google’s AppEngine will offer a wider range of runtime environments in the future. t’s an interesting Cloud-Year 2009! #buzzword

Mit CloudFront kann ich nun vor meinen öffentlichen S3 noch ein Content Delivery Network vorschalten, dass automatisch meine Inhalte über alle verfügbaren Standorte synchronisert und bei Requests auf meine Inhalte immer die schnellste Verbindung auswählt. Mehr Details zur neuen CloudFront, dem Content Delivery Network von Amazon gibt’s unter aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ und im original Wortlaut des Developer-Newsletters.

Dear AWS Customer,

Today, we’re excited to announce the public beta of Amazon CloudFront, a new web service for content delivery. With CloudFront, you can distribute content using a worldwide network of edge locations that provide low latency and high data transfer speeds. CloudFront works seamlessly with other AWS services such as Amazon S3, and like all AWS services, is self-service with no up-front commitments, no long-term contracts and pay-as-you-go pricing. You can sign up for CloudFront – and begin using it today – at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront.

The initial release lets developers and businesses deliver popular, publicly readable content worldwide. CloudFront has a number of exciting features that differ from many traditional methods of content delivery. It:

lets you get started easily there’s no need to contact a sales person or negotiate a contract. Anyone can get started in just minutes with only a credit card.
works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – you can start delivering your files stored in Amazon S3 through CloudFront edge locations in a matter of minutes.
is simple and easy to use – a single API call is all that’s needed to get started delivering your content.
lets you pay only for what you use there are no minimum fees and no long-term commitments.
To Use Amazon CloudFront, all you need to do is store your objects in Amazon S3 (make sure they are publicly readable), then, make a simple API call to register your bucket with CloudFront. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location used by Amazon CloudFront for fast delivery of your content. No negotiations, no upfront fees, and no volume commitments. It’s that simple.

You can learn more about Amazon CloudFront and get started using the service at aws.amazon.com/cloudfront.

Sincerely,
The Amazon CloudFront Team