Amazon S3, Azure, Live Grid and the cloud

Now Amazon have opened a European S3/EC2 datacenter in Dublin I am experimenting with video hosting on Amazon S3 and having data in Europe.

Several reasons:

• there is a big fat pipe out of that datacenter into most European markets; most of the family watching our videos are in Europe. It’s a lot of hops closer (lower latency, better experience) and it’s a whole lot faster (not slurping out of my server rack at 1 Mb/s at best)
• I don’t have to worry about the storage of the data. It’s just there.

I’m looking at moving other data into the cloud too; waiting to see what Microsoft offer up in terms of Azure and other offerings. Live Grid is consumer grade right now – but looks like a good start.