Amazon S3 is no longer my CDN
Published August 1, 2008 by Robbie
I’ve been very interested in Amazon’s cloud computing initiative. They’ve slowly been adding services to the point where some startups are able to use Amazon for storage, computing, and even database services. With StatSheet, I needed a simple content delivery network to host images, javascript, and stylesheets. S3 seemed like a good fit. I heard a few reports of S3 being unreliable when used as a CDN, but several bloggers I read seemed reasonably happy with them. I decided to take the plunge, change my some code, and start using S3 for static assets.
After a month I’ve decided to switch everything back to my own web servers. Why? Well of course there was the well publicized outage a couple of weeks ago, but the bigger problem for me is that periodically files would take an extremely long time to download. Occasionally I’d notice the site acting really sluggish. At least 3 times in the past month when that kind of slowness occurred, it was because an important file (like a javascript file needed for onLoad) is taking FOREVER to download. And by forever I mean on the order or 2-3 minutes! For just one file!
Below is a snap shot from Firebug that shows a 194KB javascript file being served from S3 taking 2.2 minutes to download! I could reload (with caching turned off) and it would take 2-3 minutes again. Each time I tried it.
Now eventually the file will start downloading fast again, but for an important file like that (or my main logo image), it dramatically alters the site’s appearance. Now I know there is a slight chance that it wasn’t S3 at all. Perhaps a network issue somewhere between me and S3. The catch is that all 3 times I’ve seen this issue happen, I can download the file with no problem directly from my web servers. I just don’t want to take the chance.
So I’m giving up on my S3 experiment for now. I’ll still use it for backups, perhaps, but as a CDN it just didn’t work well.
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Hi Robbie,
Sorry to hear about your experience with S3. I think that part of the problem is that S3 is not a CDN solution. To me S3 is a shared storage solution and puts it closer to shared hosting than anything else.
With a CDN you still have a host and you are extending its capabilities to handle high traffic spikes and sustained traffic growth via caching services.
S3 is a mass of storage that you can plug into on the cheap. Unfortunately I see this confusion affecting more and more content providers.
Yeah, S3 sucks according to my experience. It’s not reliable enough and occasional timeouts occur once in some days. Aggressive retrying sometimes helps, but not every time.
You can now use CloudFront as your CDN which is probably more reliable.