Today, Amazon entered beta with CloudFront, an expanded cloud service aimed at taking the company into the same league as Akamai and Limelight. As with other cloud services, customers will be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The first beta of CloudFront from Amazon promises a service designed to add content distribution network (CDN) capabilities to the company's existing cloud in order to enable faster download times for users storing large files such as graphics and video. Through CloudFront, users will replicate content files from elsewhere in the cloud to the "edge servers" closest to their own physical locations.

Although CloudFront's services are expected to be similar to existing CDNs from Akamai and Limelight, Amazon will charge on a "pay as you go" basis so that customers only pay for the files that are actually downloaded.

In contrast, other CDNs have tended to require long-term contracts, and only those customers with extensive content downloading needs have been able to work out discounted prices.

Early users of CloudFront include Dallas, Texas-based Woot, for delivery of product photos to shoppers; and PlayFish, a London, UK-based producer of online games.