ClearTech Loop Special Edition: Rethinking CDN Pricing with AWS CloudFront

Cloud pricing can look simple until the bill arrives. 

In this ClearTech Loop Special Edition, Jo Peterson talks with Cristian Graziano, Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, about AWS CloudFront flat rate plans and why predictable pricing matters for teams delivering internet facing applications. 

Cristian explains how CloudFront helps accelerate and secure applications, why customers often combine CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, DNS, logging, and monitoring, and how flat rate plans are designed to make that model easier to understand, approve, and manage. 

In this episode 

Jo and Cristian discuss: 

• What AWS CloudFront does  
• Why CDN pricing can get complicated  
• How CloudFront flat rate plans simplify pricing  
• Why predictable monthly costs matter for developers, business units, SMBs, and enterprise teams  
• How AWS is making security part of the starting point  
• Why WAF, DDoS protection, bot controls, and security visibility matter for internet facing applications  

Featured quote 

“Security is included by default.” Cristian Graziano, Principal Product Manager, AWS 

About the guest 

Cristian Graziano is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. His work focuses on the customer experience for AWS CloudFront, including onboarding, console experience, and pricing. 

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Transcript

Jo Peterson: 0:07

Hey y'all. Thank you so much for joining. I am Joe Peterson. I am the CIO at Clarify 360 and the Chief Analyst at Clear Tech Research. This is a special edition of Clear Tech Loop. I am here with mr. Christian Graziano, principal product manager at Amazon Web Services. Hi, Christian.

Cristian Graziano: 0:26

Hey, Jo.

Jo Peterson: 0:28

Thank you so much for taking time to visit.

Cristian Graziano: 0:30

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jo Peterson: 0:32

Okay, so what is the principal product manager at Amazon Web Services that is working with the AWS CloudFront rate plan, do?

Cristian Graziano: 0:42

yeah, so the roles we might have different focus areas within the team across different product managers, but my role specifically is around the user experience for CloudFront customers, so think things like onboarding the console experience and pricing,

Jo Peterson: 0:59

so in case someone's not an AWS user. I know there could be one or two companies on the planet not using y'all, maybe one or two. But what is AWS CloudFront?

Cristian Graziano: 1:11

So, for Amazon CloudFront, we're a content delivery network, which just means we accelerate and secure your applications, so we can globally distribute your traffic and basically speed up the delivery time for your web application.

Jo Peterson: 1:25

So, if I'm a gamer and I love to game, but I want quick interaction with my game, how's Cloud Front going to do that for me?

Cristian Graziano: 1:34

Yeah, that's a good use case. So, we have we have points of presence or edge locations distributed across the globe, so instead of having your game or application maybe in one physical server in one location, like let's say you put it in, like the North Virginia region, users that are located close to that, because of the latency in the distance, will get faster performance, but anyone that's not really close to your server will have to have additional latency as the data transfers back and forth over the network, so CloudFront, we actually have a distributed network of edge locations across the globe, and so customers are, you know, always maybe within a couple of milliseconds, maybe 1020, milliseconds, depending on the specifics, and they'll get much faster response times by just putting CloudFront in front of your application.

Jo Peterson: 2:19

That's great. Thank you for explaining that. So, you guys just rolled out this really cool flat rate plan, and I say it's cool because you were nice enough to give me an overview of it, and we were talking about it when you decided to do this as an organization. What was the goal of bringing these plans to market?

Cristian Graziano: 2:39

Yeah, I think we were really thinking about what are the different features and services customers use to deliver and secure their applications, and what we found is customers tend to use quite a few different AWS services, kind of like Lego blocks that they'll put together, so you might have something like CloudFront for your web server, you need some WAF and DDoS protection, you need DNS to actually resolve your domain name, you might want some logging, and so there's all these different services available to you, and you can, you can really easily construct those on AWS and put those together, but from a pricing perspective, they're all priced separately, and we're really easy for customers to just have a single line item on their bill that covers all these different services, plus do it at a flat rate, so the customer just pays essentially a flat price every single month, regardless of how much usage they have, so that there's no variation in their bill.

Jo Peterson: 3:32

So, but then there was an added benefit too. There was a little bit of icing on that cake in terms of egress charges. Can you talk about that a little bit, because that was really appealing.

Cristian Graziano: 3:44

Yeah, you mean for just the broader AWS customer base?

Jo Peterson: 3:47

Yeah,

Cristian Graziano: 3:48

yeah, there's, there's, there's this cool benefit on on AWS where if you're if you're using CloudFront with another AWS service, like let's say Application Load Balancer, S3 API Gateway, if you put CloudFront in front of your application, the data transfer from, let's say, ALB to CloudFront is free, and so one of the cool things with these flat rate plans is for any customer really delivering out to the internet, maybe out of ALB or S3, they can put CloudFront with one of these flat rate plans in front of their application, and then they get the benefit of the fixed rate flat rate plan, all the features and benefits that come with it, like with CloudWatch, and we can go, we can go over the specifics, and laugh, etc. but it helps you kind of normalize that data transfer price and get a fixed price, even if you're not using CloudFront today.

Jo Peterson: 4:34

So, thank you, that's great. So, I brought up a gaming customer. What are a couple other customers that are going to go, 'Wow, this is cool. I really want to use this. Give me a couple examples.

Cristian Graziano: 4:44

Yeah, I mean, it really could vary. I think I think the broadest, the broadest sense is any customer that has an internet-facing web application. But a lot of good examples we see are like full site delivery, maybe you have like an actual website, it could be an e-commerce website, it could. Be could be a digital publisher, it could be a business or b website, it could be a SaaS application, a dashboard that your customers are logging into, to like a console where they're configuring and managing the application. Really nice way to just go in and get a flat rate price, get all the services and features you need to deliver that without having to estimate costs up front, with having to track all your monthly spend,

Jo Peterson: 5:24

yeah. And this is really great for, like, I know that we always think, "Oh, hey, it's the director of IT that is going to be the one that's most interested in in this, but you've made it super simple, so now the lines of business are going to be able to come in because they're going to know what their costing looks like. There's not going to be a lot of figuring out for them to do here with this model. So, who else might be interested in using this?

Cristian Graziano: 5:51

Yeah, I think that's a really good example. You might have business units within a larger organization that can now just go in, get the approvals, it's got security and everything built in, which usually helps facilitate that for most customers, most customers. So that's one really good use case, but it could go all the way down to just an individual developer who's just getting started on AWS, maybe they're a hobbyist or they're just learning AWS, they're setting up, and they go on the free plan, which is $0 per month, and one of the unique things is the prices, because it's fixed, it's $0 per month, you can't go over, whereas on a lot of the other free tier options you get a certain amount of usage before billing starts, and so if you're, if your usage spikes because of unexpected traffic or something else, you could actually end up spending more if you exceed the free tier, so that's a really nice benefit for those segments of customers, but then as you kind of go up the chain, you can have maybe like a local regional business, like you could have maybe a landscaping company

Jo Peterson: 6:53

hm

Cristian Graziano: 6:54

regional, right, and they, they want to maybe spend $15 per month with just a really basic website, but they want to, they want that confidence that their price is fixed and they're getting all the reliability of AWS, and all these different features and services. Then you can move up to the chain to maybe a business or organization that maybe has a lot more security requirements. They're a lot more concerned about WAF, they're concerned about DDoS attacks, they need a lot more configurability. They really go in and they're customizing the WAF rules, they have a lot more, a lot more requirements around how things work, and so they might want to go in to one of the upper tiers, like a business plan, which is priced at 200 per month, and then you can go all the way to like a large scaling startup or a scaling enterprise, an SMB doing a lot more traffic, they want to, they're thinking about things like origin load reduction, they're thinking about high availability and failover at the origin level, they're thinking about scaling and growing kind of beyond where they are today, and kind of looking out into the future, and so all those different customers would be good fits for the various different tiers that we've built into these plans.

Jo Peterson: 7:55

Yeah, and that's that's really important. You said something that was was kind of key in there, you have taken away the security worry for businesses with this, right? So maybe you've got a great big team and lots of smart people that you can rely on on that team, but maybe you don't. Maybe you're that little landscaping company that has one IT guy that's doing 15 different things, or gal, and you've taken in my mind the security worry away, because I know that if I come and get this package, I'm going to be using best of breed security across the AWS environment, and I don't have to guess about how it's going to fit together, if it's going to fit together, if I have everything covered or not, so that's really kind of a cool thing.

Cristian Graziano: 8:45

Yeah, that is that. I'm glad you, you called that out. That's a really big deal for a lot of customers. Security is included by default. WAF is even included from the free tier, so it's it's baked into this from the beginning, and then as you move up, there are additional security capabilities and more advanced, advanced features in the higher tiers, but to your point, a customer no longer needs to think, okay, what is this going to cost me, go do the cost exercise, maybe have to go get approvals, they've got the features included in the plans we've built, we've built in all the security capabilities that we think customers need at each of these different levels, and so if you're in one of these plans and you suddenly are thinking about bots, or you're seeing a rise in bot traffic. We have that included in the plan, so you can just go turn that on, and you have to worry about the cost. We've also, beyond just the pricing, there's quite a bit of integration in the CloudFront console, so we have a security tab where you can go in, you can see all your security metrics. It's kind of like a visual dashboard, but you can actually configure things without writing security rules, so it's a really cool way for customers to, you know, it's not just the security bar on the pricing side and what's on the plans, but it's actually the experience of like enabling these things. Where do you put that bots rule relative to other rules? We kind of handle that for you. If you need to turn on rate limiting or we detect you're using something like WordPress, we just surface the right rules. You just click. And turn them on, and so we really wanted it to be a cohesive end-to-end experience,

Jo Peterson: 10:04

right, and and if you want something, and you can buy it in there, if you want load balancing, for example, right, if you want, if you want some kinds of things that that are going to give you some disaster recovery, maybe in the event that your primary site goes down, or your primary site gets hit with too much traffic. There's things built in that they can pick and choose. So, I find that really, really interesting and cool. So, good job to you and your team for doing this. And I'm excited that you guys are rolling this out, and I think it's going to be wildly successful. That's just my two pennies.

Cristian Graziano: 10:41

We've seen tons of excitement from customers, lots of feedback. We've been moving pretty quickly and iterating and launching lots of new stuff. We just recently added a whole set of new features into the plans, and we're continuing to invest here. So, really excited to see how customers take these and run with them.

Jo Peterson: 10:58

Well, thank you for spending some time today, and I'm looking forward to having a conversation with you in six months when you guys are breaking records.

Cristian Graziano: 11:07

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Joe, for having me.

Jo Peterson: 11:09

All right, take care.

Cristian Graziano: 11:10

Bye.