This article, a follow up on an earlier blogpost, gives a more detailed look at the location of the Amazon CloudFront service. This location is derived from the time it takes to connect to it from a number of locations.
The summary is that CloudFront is on the average about 40-50 milliseconds away from a random point on the Internet. This is pretty good compared to a site located in e.g. New York (120 milliseconds) and is in the same league as other content distribution networks. In specific markets, it is pretty near: San Francisco: 3 milliseconds, New York: 13 milliseconds, Western Europe: 1-30 milliseconds.
According to Amazon, CloudFront is in 16 locations, in contrast to the S3 storage service and the EC2 compute service, which have only 4 points of presence around the world.
The following table gives distances (in milliseconds) from selected locations of the monitoring network to Amazon CloudFront (cities annotated with CF have CloudFront locations):
|
Distance
|
City
|
Country
|
CF
|
|
1
|
Amsterdam
|
Netherlands
|
CF
|
|
1
|
Ashburn
|
U.S.A.
|
CF
|
|
2
|
Santa Clara
|
U.S.A.
|
CF
|
|
2
|
Dallas
|
U.S.A.
|
CF
|
|
3
|
Hong Kong
|
China
|
CF
|
|
3
|
Singapore
|
Singapore
|
CF
|
|
4
|
Cologne
|
Germany
|
|
|
5
|
Nagano
|
Japan
|
|
|
7
|
Manchester
|
United Kingdom
|
|
|
9
|
New York
|
U.S.A.
|
CF
|
|
11
|
Kuala Lumpur
|
Malaysia
|
|
|
12
|
London
|
United Kingdom
|
CF
|
|
20
|
Padova
|
Italy
|
|
|
27
|
Dublin
|
Ireland
|
CF
|
|
36
|
Bangkok
|
Thailand
|
|
|
59
|
Mumbai
|
India
|
|
|
75
|
Haifa
|
Israel
|
|
|
154
|
Sydney
|
Australia
|
|
|
176
|
Rio de Janeiro
|
Brazil
|
|
|
244
|
Cape Town
|
South Africa
|
As the table shows, the proximity of CloudFront is uneven around the world.
CloudFront changes its connectivity regularly, mostly for the better. An interesting data point for example is that on April 8, CloudFront created a presence near Hong Kong dropping the distance from 160 milliseconds to 4 milliseconds. The following graph gives more detail.
In line with our earlier research, this data too shows that maintaining good proximity in an ever changing Internet is not a trivial thing to do. See for example the ever changing proximities to New York and New Zealand.
Our research was done in collaboration with Jitscale (a cloud consultancy) and WatchMouse (a website monitoring company) . Distances are measured by measuring a TCP connect to an http URL of an object provided by Cloudfront, and does not include DNS lookup.
Om
8 July 2011 at 04:50>Amzon cloud front is really Amazing service provider world wide, It is in Market demands, most of the companies opting Amazon cloud to handle their services..I am also one of them Its good to use this services as well you can try to use different tools to handle your stuff on S3 as well services provided by Amazon cloud front too..
I suggest thier are many clients available of Amzon S3 whcih