Dave Cancel has a good article on the merits of using Amazon S3 as a content delivery network. He evaluated CacheFly, EdgeCast, Amazon S3 and Nginx running on Amazon EC2 – and found Amazon S3 performed the worst.
I know quite a few people either using or considering Amazon S3 as a CDN – this test would suggest that it’s perhaps not the best strategy. In fairness to Amazon S3, I think the performance would have been shown to be greater had he used the option of additionally having the file on S3 Europe, and had visitors dynamically sent to the correct location via DNS. Of course, it could be argued that one of the points of using a CDN is that you don’t have to do that sort of thing yourself. As far as I’m aware S3 has no option for global load balancing.
1 Comment for Using Amazon S3 as a CDN (or not)
Darby Blake | June 4, 2009 at 11:37 pm
We were evaluating Content Delivery Network EdgeCast Networks and S3. Although at first glance, S3 apears less expensive upon closer examination, we are not at all sure that’s actully the case.
We took a snapshot of our Cache-hit-ratio, which is applicable for our HTTP delivered traffic and came up with the following:
73,894 Hits
- 80% cache hit
- 14% cache miss
- 4% expired cache hit
- 2% cache miss due to client refresh
Then I simply used out the calculator on S3 and run some different scenarios….
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
Notice when you choose some of the customer scenarios (1/2 way down the long calculator near the Calculate Now button)…that their own scenarios show up to $1/GB:
Customer Sample 1: 100 GBs on S3 = Cost $102/month or $1/GB
Customer Sample 4: 400 GBs on S3 = Cost $149/month or $0.3725/GB
Customer Sample 7: 400 GBs on S3 = Cost $72/month or $0.18/GB
This last scenario is most ideal cost-wise with about 12% outbound traffic so its about 40% less than what we’re doing now.
Bottom line is that our service with S3 has unpredictable cost, no 100% uptime SLA, and support that requires payment. Its the cheap solution but it can get expensive quickly depending on the nature of our traffic.
Since EdgeCast is stomping s3 performance wise, according ot our Gomexz testing, we are probably going to go with them.
Darby