Content distribution, now for the masses.

How a CDN can speed up your apps

Content distribution, now for the masses
Tomislav Simnett

Tomislav Simnett

1 min read

We’ve known about Akamai, who’s been long regarded as the leaders in CDN technology for some time now. As of a few weeks ago, there’s a new kid on the block.

Amazon has released CloudFront 


On the 19th of November, Amazon released CloudFront, and it’s what I think has been lacking in their S3 storage solution that now makes Amazon a key competitor on the CDN front. That of what Amazon has termed “Edge Zones”. Nothing particularly complex in the definition: You upload your content, and you can have Edge Zones in the USA, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan. Amazon will automatically fetch the data from S3, cache it at the Edge Zone location, and from that point forward the transfer time for your users will be blistering!

What to expect


I fully expect to see some really innovative uses coming out of this and we’ll keep tabs on it here and keep you abreast of the happenings. If you’ve got a project you’re working on that uses 00CloudFront, feel free to comment here. It would be really good to see the different uses people have for CDN tech.

How much capacity is your business leaving behind?

Use the calculator to estimate what slow processes, manual work and disconnected systems could really be costing you.

More posts.

View all
AI can write the code. Your business still needs an engineer

Tech

AI can write the code. Your business still needs an engineer

AI can now write a lot of the code we used to pay developers to write. That doesn’t make software engineering irrelevant. It makes the bit that was always more important much harder to ignore: understanding what should be built in the first place.

Vibe coding can turn your assumptions into working software incredibly quickly. But if the assumption is wrong, you’ve simply built the wrong thing faster. Good engineering starts before the app, CRM or automation. It starts by understanding how the business actually works, where people add judgement, and which parts of the process shouldn’t exist at all.

Tomislav Simnett

Tomislav Simnett

11 min read

Four interruptions, two lost hours and the process your people shouldn’t be driving

Business

Four interruptions, two lost hours and the process your people shouldn’t be driving

Four interruptions can wipe nearly two hours from the useful part of a working day, and that’s before you count the interruption itself. Add long manual processes, routine human error, rework and stress, and you get a working environment where good people spend too much time recovering, correcting and chasing.

The answer isn’t to tell people to focus harder. It’s to design a better system, one that drives the process, preserves context, moves routine work automatically and only interrupts people when their judgement is genuinely needed.

Tomislav Simnett

Tomislav Simnett

10 min read

The approval takes five minutes. The waiting costs far more.

Business

The approval takes five minutes. The waiting costs far more.

A five-minute approval can leave work waiting for days. Once a quote, purchase, job or invoice misses its slot, the delay spreads into the rest of the process.

People switch tasks, schedules move, customers wait and cash arrives later. The decision itself may be quick, but the queue around it can cost far more than anyone realises.

Tomislav Simnett

Tomislav Simnett

9 min read