Amazon has launched an HTTP content delivery service (CDN) called CloudFront that works with its S3 cloud storage widgetry and EC2.

It's now a public beta, having been privately tested the last couple few months. It's the stuff Amazon promised in September and may someday give the likes of Akamai and Limelight some bad nights if and when it gets more sophisticated and appeals to bigger accounts.

For now figure videos, software downloads, music downloads, and frequently accessed Web site images and objects. No streaming. No live broadcasting.

Amazon says it caches copies of content close to end users for low-latency delivery and provides the high, sustainable data transfer rates needed to deliver the objects - particularly big objects - to end users at scale through a worldwide network of edge locations.

Amazon says it's fast but didn't say how fast.

Developers and businesses store the original version of their object in S3 and register it with the new service using a so-called CreateDistribution API call that returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations.

The domain name is then used in URLs and whenever they're accessed CloudFront is supposed to determine the optimal edge location to serve the content.

Amazon's got eight edge locations in the US, four in Western Europe and two in Asia.

The prep work can reportedly take all of 10 minutes.

Like other Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, CloudFront means pay-as-you-go pricing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments.

Amazon is charging 17 cents a gigabyte for the first 10TB of content delivered a month in the US and Europe and 21 or 22 cents in Asia plus a penny or so per 10,000 requests for content. The cheapest rates are for over 150TB a month.

It's also offering to sell 24x7x365 AWS personalized premium support for the stuff.

Indicative of its cloud muscle Amazon said over 440,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services.

See http://aws.amazon.com/.