Amazon CTO Werner Vogels writes about the company's new content-delivery plan:

Today we are announcing that we are expanding the cloud by adding a new service that will give developers and businesses the ability to serve data to their customers world-wide, using low-latency and high data transfer rates. Using a global network of edge locations this new service can deliver popular data stored in Amazon S3 to customers around the globe through local access...

...This is an important first step in expanding the cloud to give developers even more control over how their applications and their data are served by the cloud.

Om Malik says the service "could shake the very nature of the industry and pose a serious challenge to not only dozens of CDN upstarts but also become a thorn in the side of existing giants such as Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks...Amazon wants to make buying CDN services as simple as buying a book."

Mixed metaphors aside -- shake the nature? -- an interesting take.