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Amazon Silk Smoothes the Way for Kindle Fire

Analyst Al Hilwa said he believed Amazon Silk could be a game changer. "In one fell swoop, Amazon harnesses its commanding lead in cloud services, the content richness of a leading online retailer and its successful Kindle business strategy to deliver what might become one of most effective antidotes to the mobile-bandwidth crunch." For all the talk about the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is looking to eat into Apple's iPad  tablet  dominance with a $199 price tag, there's web-browsing software  behind the Fire that could also help differentiate the device  among its competitors.
It's called Amazon Silk. Amazon describes it as a "split browser" architecture  that makes the hardware move faster by tapping into the computing  speed and power of the Amazon web Services cloud , or AWS. The Silk browser software comes pre-installed on he Kindle Fire and also sits on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, server fleet.

"We re-factored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. "When you use Silk, without thinking about it or doing anything explicit, you're calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing."

Smooth as...

Here's how it works: With each page request, Silk decides how to divide the computing power between the mobile  hardware and EC2. Silk factors in considerations like network  conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content. The promised result: a faster web-browsing experience.

With Silk, Amazon is tackling a real challenge in mobile computing. Modern websites are growing more complex. Amazon threw out some statistics to illustrate that point. On a recent day, Amazon noted, constructing the CNN.com home page required 161 files served from 25 separate domains.

Amazon said this degree of complexity is common, suggesting that a typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 domains. Amazon also said latency over wireless  connections is high -- on the order of 100 milliseconds round-trip. Serving a web page requires hundreds of such round trips, the firm explained, only some of which can be done in parallel. In aggregate, this adds seconds to page load times.

By adding EC2 into the mobile-browsing mix, consumers are always connected to the backbone of the Internet. That means round-trip latency is only 5 milliseconds (or less) to most websites. Tapping EC2 also offers more memory. If hundreds of files are required to build a web page across dozens of domains, Silk can request all of this content simultaneously with EC2, without overwhelming the mobile device processor  or affecting battery life.

"I think the value proposition of optimizing browsing technology  on the server side will increase in relation to two important things," said Al Hilwa, program director at IDC 's Applications Development Software group. "One is the cost and crowding of bandwidth , especially mobile bandwidth, and two is the degree to which browser owners also become cloud services providers and hosters to the workloads of mobile services and apps  that provision to their customers."

Supporting Amazon's Content Strategy

Silk also supports Amazon's content delivery over hardware sales strategy. Amazon has positioned the Kindle Fire as a service  rather than a device, and Silk leverages collaborative filtering techniques and machine  learning algorithms Amazon has built over the last 15 years to power features such as "customers who bought this also bought..."

"While the split browser architecture is not new, Opera having been a player for a couple of years, I find the overall strategy to be an interesting spin on the me-too Android  software we have seen so far, and possibly a game changer," Hilwa said. "In one fell swoop, Amazon harnesses its commanding lead in cloud services, the content richness of a leading online retailer and its successful Kindle business  strategy to deliver what might become one of most effective antidotes to the mobile-bandwidth crunch."