I thought half the benefit of CDNs was reduced latency, which AWS does not provide.

I keep hearing comments about AWS and latency, but I haven't used it (yet!) so I don't have any first-hand experience. I've seen that S3 can provide direct public links, but are there latency issues that make these too slow for general purpose content serving?

I'll elaborate a little. A CDN is supposed to serve content from a server very close to each user, like in the same city. Thus CDNs must have many servers in many cities. AWS does not have many locations, thus because of the speed of light it cannot have latency as low as a good CDN. This is not a problem with AWS; it wasn't designed as a CDN.

Do you need a CDN for "general purpose content serving"? Probably not.

Thanks for the reply, that makes total sense. I suppose CDN services should be compatible with AWS anyway, so they wouldn't be mutually exclusive. Each for its purpose :)