Amazon S3 has BitTorrent support

The Tech Crunch folks published a nice review of Amazon S3 grid storage. But they totaly missed what’s so cool about it. If you read beyond the standard features about price and storage you will find out why it’s really the killer app. Take a look at the developer documentation and have a look at the last section entitled “Using BitTorrent with S3“. That’s right Amazon S3 supports BitTorrent, it will create and seed your object(file).

Here is the snippet from the docs,

There is no extra charge for use of BitTorrent with S3. Data transfer via the BitTorrent protocol is metered at the same rate as client/server delivery. To be precise, whenever a downloading BitTorrent client requests a “piece” of an object from the S3 “seeder,” charges accrue just as if an anonymous request for that piece had been made using the REST or SOAP protocol. These charges will appear on your S3 bill and usage reports in the same way. The difference is that if a lot of clients are requesting the same object simultaneously via BitTorrent, then the amount of data S3 must serve to satisfy those clients will be lower than with client/server delivery. This is because the BitTorrent clients are simultaneously uploading and downloading amongst themselves. The data transfer savings achieved from use of BitTorrent can vary widely depending on how popular your object is. Less popular objects require heavier use of the “seeder” to serve clients, and thus the difference between BitTorrent distribution costs and client/server distribution costs may be small for such objects. In particular, if only one client is ever downloading a particular object at a time, the cost of BitTorrent delivery will be the same as direct download.

Wow! And to create that torrent? No problem,

Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a “?torrent” query string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object. No authentication is required. Once you have a BitTorrent client installed, downloading an object using BitTorrent download may be as easy as opening this URL in your web browser.

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