 Back to theCUBE, my name is Jeff Frick, I'm with Silicon Angle. We're here at the Amazon AWS Summit 2013 in San Francisco. I think there's a number of stops on this tour. But we're in San Francisco, we're at Moscone Center. We're theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we grab the people that you want to talk to, we ask them the questions that you want to ask them, and we invite you to participate. The hashtag for the show is AWS Summit with two S's, AWS Summit, send us a tweet, we'll get your question if we can. And I'm happy to welcome to theCUBE, Nihar Bihani from the Cloud, CloudFront group. It's already been a good day, we've been going back to back to back here. CloudFront, so tell us, what is CloudFront? Sure, so CloudFront is a content delivery service. It's one of the Amazon web services, and CloudFront offers customers an easy way to deliver their content globally, using our network of edge locations worldwide. And CloudFront also integrates well with other AWS services to really help accelerate the delivery of content from the origin all the way to the end users. CloudFront has a variety of different features that I can talk more about, and lots of different customers that are using CloudFront. So it begs the question, which I always have to remind, I tell my kids who are like 15, the search engine wars were over before Google even started, right? There's been CDN services for a very long time, so why CloudFront, what was the opportunity, why did Amazon decide to come out with this product? Sure, so CloudFront really came about because of a usage pattern that we noticed. So when Amazon S3 launched, we noticed that a lot of customers were using Amazon S3 as a CDN. What that meant was a small amount of storage on S3, but lots of data transfer out of S3 to end users. And what we realized and thought about is that there must be a latent need in the market for the characteristics that S3 offers, but in the content delivery space. So these characteristics are self-service, pay as you go, pay for what you use, content delivery at the same low prices, low costs that S3 charges for storage, for instance. So that's how really CloudFront came about, and we started to develop the CloudFront offering and launched, in November of 2008, a very minimal service, that's really how AWS approaches launching new services and new features, by starting out really with the minimum viable offering and then continuously adding features and functionality over time. So when we launched back in 2008, we had 14 edge locations that has now grown to 39, and we only had HTTP delivery at the time for static content and accelerating static content. And now we have live and on demand streaming, HTTPS delivery, private content, we have dynamic content delivery and a host of other features that we've added since. So that's interesting. So one of the themes of Andy's keynote earlier today was a couple of things I want to kind of touch on. One was kind of pace of innovation at Amazon. And clearly I think I don't work at Amazon, but being a single application web store back in the day, you have a culture of just adding to it, adding to it, adding features, adding features. And it's interesting how you've taken that now really with more of an infrastructure product. So my question is, and the other thing you talk about is having these customers come in, tell you what they need, and really helping to drive the prioritization of the roadmap. So did just like a huge bubble of customers start using S3 in this manner, or was there one or two that raised their hand and said, oh my God, this is the, I got to have it? Or was it, did they hit some kind of funky pricing anomaly that demonstrated that there was this need? How did that actually happen from raw data with thousands of customers into, oh my goodness, this is a really great opportunity for us? Right, yeah, so what we really noticed was the usage pattern from a number of customers. And we noticed that they're using S3 as a CDN. Their primary use case was delivering content, delivering content to end users around the world. And that's where we thought that the characteristics of S3 could really apply well to a CDN service that we could offer. So that's really how the content, the cloud front as a product came about. And then from that point on, it's really exactly what you said, which is listen to our customers, understand what they need, and then develop a roadmap, prioritize it, and launch those features as quickly as possible with the same high standards of operational excellence and security that our customers expect. So we've continuously been innovating over the last four and a half years and adding a variety of features by listening to customers and understanding what features are most important to them and prioritizing those features in that way. So can you give us a couple of examples of folks prior to this that maybe couldn't afford a CDN? Did the economics didn't work out? There really wasn't the opportunity, they didn't see it, that they're using it now in some neat and innovative ways that people would like to hear. Yeah, absolutely. So CDNs have been around for a long time, but what CloudFront really added when CloudFront launched is that sell service, low cost, pay as you go offering in the content delivery space. So prior to CloudFront, customers had to use traditional CDNs where they had to pay a premium for delivering different types of content. They had to get into and negotiate long-term contracts with CDN vendors. And that really resulted in a lot of customers not being able to take advantage of a lot of the innovative technology that CDNs provide and the benefits that CDNs offer to the customers as well as their end users. With CloudFront, I'll give you a specific example. So over the last year, we have released several features that enable delivery of dynamic content. So, and CloudFront has- Like what, dynamic content? So dynamic content, so weather data. Okay, weather data is dynamic because it's changing very quickly. And it's also personalized and customized because the weather here in downtown San Francisco quite different from- It's very different than just across the bay. Just across the bay, exactly. So Earth Networks is one of our customers. They have the Weatherbug application and they use CloudFront to deliver their entire desktop mobile applications and both the dynamic and the static content and be able to deliver that weather data quickly to the end users who are looking for that information. You know, CloudFront has- What they really liked about CloudFront is the ease of use. CloudFront was super easy for them to configure. They didn't have to write any custom code which they had to do with their previous CDN. And they also found significant cost savings when using CloudFront for delivering their entire application. There is actually a great video from Andy Rosenbaum who's a director at Earth Networks. It's available up on the CloudFront website where he really talks about why they selected CloudFront, how they configured CloudFront and the benefits they're seeing. Okay. Are most of the clients using CloudFront as an extension of their existing AWS services that they're purchasing? Or is it often a lead offering that people are looking for this capability and that's your first touch point with that customer? It's really both. We see both types of use cases but CloudFront does work very well with other AWS services. Okay. So CloudFront, when we started CloudFront, it only worked with Amazon S3 but then later we added support for custom origin servers. So you can use ELB fronting EC2 instances or you can even use a web server that's in your own infrastructure outside of AWS as the origin server for Amazon CloudFront. One thing I'd add there in terms of working well together is earlier this year we announced a price reduction if you're using CloudFront with either Amazon S3 or Amazon EC2 as the origin server. The data transfer between the origin and the CloudFront are actually at a preferential rate which is up to 83% discounted. So that's a better together feature where using AWS origins with CloudFront can really help you save on costs. So, and maybe you don't know the answer but are you guys starting AWS more generically to bundle combinations of services in more of a package as opposed to two and all the carts? So you, you know, a typical weather publisher I don't know what the logical bundles would be. You guys probably do. This is kind of the combination of assets that you want to get. And you know, we call it an X and there's advantages to purchasing it that way. I think it goes back to what the customers want and what the customers are asking us for. Our customers, we're very fortunate to have hundreds of thousands of customers across the world and they are very vocal and we love that fact because they tell us exactly what they want. So when they tell us that they want to bundle different services together they want to, you know, they want easier management by using things like CloudFormation or Elastic Beanstalk which are some of our services that help you manage your infrastructure. We really take, you know, we listen to them. We take that feedback, you know, go back to work, brainstorm and come up with innovative ways of solving their problems. So, you know, yeah, if, you know, if there are different types of bundles that customers are looking for, absolutely. There's, you know, something we would totally consider. So what's the craziest, the craziest customer example that you've seen recently using this service or innovative, you know, something who would have known? Yeah, there's a couple of, you know, innovative ways in which customers are using CloudFormation. So whole side delivery, which is delivering your entire website, both static and dynamic content is one way that is really innovative and what CloudFormation has done is democratized using a CDN for delivering your entire website and not just your static content. So that has enabled customers like EarthNetworks, the reference I gave earlier to deliver all of their web applications, you know, their entire application via CloudForm and save on costs without sacrificing any performance. They see the same great performance as they did before. The other innovative, you know, example I'd offer is live streaming. So CloudForm added live streaming support over the past year and a half and we've seen customers use live streaming to deliver live content, all different types of live content to end users around the world and what's really innovative about this use case is we give customers the capability to control their origin server. That's taking the live feed. And, you know, customers, the origin server is actually running on EC2 instances and customers have root access to their origin servers. So they can configure advanced features or functionality and however they want to deliver their live stream and then have CloudForm actually cache the live video and deliver it to end users. And in the democratization, if you said, of the CDNs, are the economics changing so much that you're really getting that, you know, kind of down into, you know, releasing capabilities to folks who priorly, you know, couldn't take advantage of something like live streaming? Clearly there's some economic impacts there. We have done that numerous times over the past four and a half years since we have launched CloudForm. So like I said, you know, we launched a minimal product back in 2008 with just HTTP delivery. Then, shortly after that, we added HTTPS delivery or secure delivery. And the price for that for data transfer was the same as HTTP delivery, no additional fees. Then we added support for private content to secure, you know, giving customers additional features to secure who can access their content. And there was no additional charge to use that feature either. Then we added live and on-demand streaming. And for both of those features, again the same price as HTTP delivery. And the most recent example is the whole side delivery where now you can deliver dynamic content for the same price as static content delivery. So we're really trying to democratize what were premium features previously and you know, price them to the extent we can at the same price as static content delivery and have more and more customers take advantage of those features. Okay. And not that you can share anything out of school but you know, kind of looking down the road, you know, are there any, you know, it sounds like you guys are just cut this constant kind of pace of innovation incremental, incremental, incremental. Are there any kind of large challenges or large mountains that you're looking to take over the next year? If we come back in a year from now, you know, what, is there anything really big that you guys are really trying to address? I'd say, you know, there are three specific areas where we focus on in terms of innovating and adding new features and functionality. Okay. You know, the first one is just, you know, more features. And we ask customers every year and more often, like, you know, when I'm in one-on-one conversations with customers or smaller groups, what are the features that are most important to them? And that's how the whole side delivery features came about with the dynamic content delivery. So we'll continuously add more and more features to our offering. The second area I'd say is price. As we see economies of scale, we'll continue to lower our prices and pass on those savings to customers. We've done that across AWS. We've done that with CloudFirm and we'll try to continue to innovate there and, you know, offer lower prices to customers. And the third area I'd say is adding more edge locations around the world. Okay. CloudFirm's benefits really come to life because of the points of presence that we have around the globe. We have 39 locations today and we plan to continue to add more locations, you know, in areas where we don't have locations today to serve those end users better. Yeah, so really that, really supporting that go global, go global fast, go global easy. Absolutely. And how long have you been working on this project? I've been with CloudFirm for almost three years now. Almost three years. Awesome. Well, great. Well, thanks for coming in theCUBE. So we've been here with Nihar Bihani from the CloudFront Group at AWS doing interesting things with CDNs. Maybe I don't know, maybe we got to come up with a new term. Not CDN anymore. I'm Jeff Frick. We're at Amazon AWS Summit, San Francisco, Moscone Center. It's a beautiful day outside. We invite you to join the conversation at hashtag AWS Summit. We're in theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break. See you on the other side.