Amazon CloudFront enables global content distribution and seamless integration with Amazon S3

SEATTLE, Nov 18, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today launched Amazon CloudFront, a self-service, pay-as-you-go web service for content delivery. With CloudFront, developers and businesses can distribute content through 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. Any business or developer can get started today using the beta of CloudFront by visiting http://aws.amazon.com/.

Traditionally, to secure scalable, reliable, low latency content delivery, businesses have been required to negotiate upfront or long-term commitments. Even then, only customers with significant scale have been able to negotiate inexpensive rates. With CloudFront, there are no upfront costs or commitments required -- all developers are able to benefit from Amazon's scale to enjoy low prices.

"Our customers asked us for a way to globally distribute their most frequently accessed content with all the benefits that Amazon Web Services provides -- low, pay-as-you-go pricing, high performance, and reliability," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services. "Amazon CloudFront provides low latency, inexpensive content delivery and simple integration with Amazon S3 -- without complex sales negotiations or up-front commitments."

Built on Amazon's own highly reliable infrastructure, CloudFront lets developers and businesses deliver HTTP content through a worldwide network of edge locations. The service caches copies of content close to end users for low latency delivery, while also providing fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to end users at scale. CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon S3, where users store the original versions of objects delivered through the service. Customers need only put their objects into an Amazon S3 bucket and then register that bucket with the new service using a simple API call, which then returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations. Customers of Amazon CloudFront can also take advantage of 24x7x365 personalized assistance and technical expertise by signing up for AWS Premium Support.

Woot, an online store that offers customers a new product each day, is using CloudFront to deliver photos of its products to its online shoppers. "I deeply resent every second of my life I waste by thinking about image hosting. All I ask is that our images be served with low latency and high reliability and without a lot of hassle for me to deal with. Thanks to Amazon CloudFront, I need never again lose another moment to this insufferably tedious aspect of my job. I can feel the rage melting away," said Luke Duff, Retail IT Director at Woot.

Playfish uses Amazon CloudFront to distribute its social games. "We've grown very rapidly to over 25 million registered players and we now serve over 2 billion minutes of game play every month," said Sami Lababidi, CTO of Playfish. "CloudFront has reduced the time it takes for any customer, wherever they are, to access our games through CloudFront's fast download speeds. AWS also allows us to stay flexible as we grow and only pay for what we actually use without any long-term contracts or usage commitments."

"S3Fox is excited to announce support for Amazon CloudFront. We found the CloudFront API to be very simple to use and we were able to easily add support for the service to our product," said Rahul Jonna of Suchi Software Solutions. "The S3Fox Organizer is a simple visual way to turn an Amazon S3 bucket into a CloudFront distribution right from a web browser in a matter of seconds."

Businesses in a variety of industries are taking advantage of the instant scalability that AWS provides. CloudFront enables use cases such as video distribution, software downloads, music downloads, and delivering frequently accessed website images and objects. Over 440,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services. Sign up to use Amazon CloudFront on the Amazon Web Services website at: http://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc., (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, whichdevelopers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, and subsequent filings.

SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc.

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