Blog

Switching from Amazon S3 to a CDN

Jun 12, 2008 at 12:42 PM by Yaron Galai | View Comments | Permalink

Scaling our service and ensuring that our widgets are served quickly and reliably has been a top priority for us. We’re bloggers too, and we know how annoying it is when a blog hangs due to a widget that fails to serve quickly… urgh!!

To ensure that our servers never hang your blog, we’ve been using Amazon’s S3 service to serve all of the static files in our widget – images, JavaScripts and the CSS files. We’ve also designed our widget to degrade gracefully if there’s any service glitch after the scripts are served from Amazon so that your blog readers would never notice and degradation in the user experience.

Every service goes down occasionally, but it’s been paramount to us to make sure we don’t break (or slow down) your blog if ours does.

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve been experiencing very poor performance from the Amazon S3 service (especially outside of the US), which has caused some bloggers to see unacceptable load times of our widget. Amazon has not been communicating much about this, and so we don’t know if this was a temporary issue caused by last week’s DoS attacks on them, or whether this is a more permanent issue related to scaling.

As we scale our network, it’s important for us to make sure that bloggers are absolutely comfortable with our ability to serve our widgets quickly and reliably. Therefore we’ve moved our widgets off of Amazon, and over to Panther – a proper CDN which we hope should significantly improve the speed in which our widgets show up around the world.

If you still encounter any issues relating to the widget’s serving performance, please do let us know asap on our support forum.

Posted in Widgets| View Comments