I honestly wasn't expecting this announcement for a long time. Many people had requested this functionality, including additions to the base S3 APIs, and I knew that the easy solution was to extend only CloudFront functionality without breaking the S3 API's backward compatibility. I spent some shower-time recently trying to think of workarounds for future clients. :)
My guess had been that Amazon was stalling to prevent a flood of low-volume AWS accounts simply to host dirt cheap static websites.
Now, if your website doesn't require server side scripting, you can literally go from paying a few bucks a month for cheap hosting to spending only pennies using Amazon S3 and CloudFront to host your entire site - reliably and quickly. I'm not familiar with other cloud file providers, so if this was possible before Amazon's latest announcement, I'd love to know.
Sadly Cloudfront still won't gzip intelligently, which for a static site means you're stuck either with excess load times or with hacky JS workarounds. If and when they sort this out I'll switch from Rackspace's Cloudfiles in an instant.
So far, Cloudfront's origin servers were hardcoded to be your S3 bucket. So if you used Amazon as an extra service to serve static files of your website from a CDN, you'd have to do trickery to set up your website as the S3 bucket's origin. I assume this is what he was talking about, not having to copy his file to S3 so the CDN edge location can pull it from S3.
No thats not the case. You still have to use S3 as the origin.
This is talking about allowing you to assign a default root document, e.g. a index.html so that requests to (e.g.) http://cache.mydomain.com/ will return something.
My guess had been that Amazon was stalling to prevent a flood of low-volume AWS accounts simply to host dirt cheap static websites.
Now, if your website doesn't require server side scripting, you can literally go from paying a few bucks a month for cheap hosting to spending only pennies using Amazon S3 and CloudFront to host your entire site - reliably and quickly. I'm not familiar with other cloud file providers, so if this was possible before Amazon's latest announcement, I'd love to know.