I was curious, given the amazing rate Amazon has been improving Cloudfront, if they had decided to eat their own dog food yet and use it as the primary CDN on their crown jewel – the main Amazon.com site. They had previously entrusted Akamai for the majority of their CDN needs.
Long story short – absolutely. Of the 163 external resources on the main page, 74 of them are hosted on Cloudfront – compared to 46 on Akamai (the rest are a mixture of doubleclick, etc.). That’s pretty impressive.
I used the following methodology to come up with the numbers. My first step was to use the always-awesome Webpagetest to get a dump of all of the external resources – i.e. Javascript, CSS etc. (you can see my report here – to get the external resources you can click on “Raw object data” to get a CSV of each object). From that CSV, I just wrote a quick python script that would use Dnspython on each external hostname, do a lookup, and see if the CNAME pointed to Cloudfront, Akamai, or something else.
Below is a dump of all of the URL’s, sorted by count with their hosting CDN.
g-ecx.images-amazon.com, for example, is hosted on Cloudfront:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
g-ecx.images-amazon.com. 49 IN CNAME d1ge0kk1l5kms0.cloudfront.net.
d1ge0kk1l5kms0.cloudfront.net. 14 IN CNAME d1ge0kk1l5kms0.iad12.cloudfront.net.
while z-ecx.images-amazon.com is hosted on Akamai:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
z-ecx.images-amazon.com. 60 IN CNAME z-ecx.images-amazon.com.edgesuite.net.
z-ecx.images-amazon.com.edgesuite.net. 8725 IN CNAME a1248.g.akamai.net.
Full breakdown.
g-ecx.images-amazon.com => 56 (cloudfront)
z-ecx.images-amazon.com => 27 (akamai)
images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com => 15 (akamai)
www.amazon.com => 10 (Other)
s.amazon-adsystem.com => 8 (Other)
ecx.images-amazon.com => 8 (cloudfront)
ad.doubleclick.net => 6 (Other)
c.amazon-adsystem.com => 5 (cloudfront)
pda-as.amazon.com => 4 (Other)
fls-na.amazon.com => 4 (Other)
s0.2mdn.net => 3 (Other)
d2o307dm5mqftz.cloudfront.net => 2 (cloudfront)
pda-bes.amazon.com => 2 (Other)
ads.pubmatic.com => 2 (Other)
d3l3lkinz3f56t.cloudfront.net => 2 (cloudfront)
tag.admeld.com => 1 (akamai)
c.www.endless.com => 1 (cloudfront)
image4.pubmatic.com => 1 (Other)
tap.rubiconproject.com => 1 (Other)
sis.amazon.com => 1 (Other)
bid.openx.net => 1 (Other)
ocsp.comodoca.com => 1 (Other)
cm.g.doubleclick.net => 1 (Other)
image3.pubmatic.com => 1 (Other)
Kudos to Amazon for making the move.