TAG | content delivery network
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.
