Amazon Web Services

The current company that I'm consulting to had a recent dilemma. Problem. Whatever you want to call it. They wanted to distribute content on a CDN. Sounds easy you might say. But let's just say a few months after architects, product managers, marketing, sales, engineers talking with each other, vendors, against each other, the potpourri of indecision was annoying me. Really annoying me. I mean I understand all this blahblahblah is useful to line everyone up -- but on CDN integration?

Generally with any sort of a service, the best way to learn is to use it yourself.

So I signed up for Amazon Web Services. Put down my credit card. And built it myself. It was relatively painless. With their .net libraries, in two days I had a fully functioning synchronisation program to push content onto the CDN and also maintain a mapping database. It was so easy that I think I might one day publish my code. The only downer was the documentation. It was ALMOST really good. Some parts of it (especially the private distribution) took some guessing as to how it worked (or even worse -- the library was missing a method call that was in the documentation).

So whilst I'm not going to say whether our company will use Amazon, it looks like a great stop gap for anyone off the street who needs to distribute their content quickly and relatively painlessly.  I think with a bit more development, that last point will be gone too.