"We've heard that many customers wanted more information about how, when, where and to whom their content is being delivered, so we're happy to make this feature available starting today." With that brief announcement, the team behind Amazon CloudFront - the low-cost content delivery service from Amazon Web Services - unveiled its new Access Logging capability. Amazon also announced that its Amazon Elastic MapReduce team has also built a sample application, CloudFront LogAnalyzer.

Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels keynoting at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo in NYC in March

Access logs are activity records that show thed eveloper details about every request delivered through Amazon CloudFront. They contain a comprehensive set of information about requests for content, including the object requested, the date and time of the request, the edge location serving the request, the client IP address, the referrer and the user agent.

The CloudFront team explains it as follows:

"It's easy to get started using access logs: you just specify the name of the Amazon S3 bucket you want to use to store the logs when you configure your Amazon CloudFront distribution. There are no fees for using the access logs, beyond normal Amazon S3 charges to write, store and retrieve the logs."

The Amazon Elastic MapReduce team has also built a sample application, CloudFront LogAnalyzer, that will analyze Amazon CloudFront access logs.   Additionally, several Amazon partners have also built solutions that can help with the analysis of access logs. There is more information about these in the AWS Solution Catalog.

• Werner Vogels Keynotes to Standing Room Only Crowd in New York City