I received the following e-mail from Amazon.com today.

Many of you have asked us to let you know ahead of time about features and services that are currently under development so that you can better plan for how that functionality might integrate with your applications. To that end, we are excited to share some early details with you about a new offering we have under development here at AWS – a content delivery service.

This new service will provide you a high performance method of distributing content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly readable content over HTTP connections. Our goal is to create a content delivery service that:

• Lets developers and businesses get started easily – there are no minimum fees and no commitments. You will only pay for what you actually use.
• Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
• Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for the original, definitive versions of your files while making the content delivery service easier to use.
• Has a global presence – we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You’ll start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3, making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service. This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your web pages or application. When clients request an object using this domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that simple.

We’re currently working with a small group of private beta customers, and expect to have this service widely available before the end of the year. If you’d like to be notified when we launch, please let us know by registering below.

Now what someone needs to do is write a component for Joomla that publishes content to AWS S3 and to this new content delivery service.  The end result would be high-availabilty content managed by the best Open Source CMS on the market.  Nice.

Update: Om Malik of GigaOm analyzes the potential of an Amazon CDN, noting that AWS S3 customer Voxel beat Amazon to the punch, and discusses the threat this represents to established CDNs Akamai and Limelight.