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I heard this phrase for the first time in a while just the other day and it made me think and wonder about Amazon – their web site, and their CDN CloudFront.

When I held positions in both Product Management and Product Marketing. I would often hear the saying “we have to eat our own dog food” during product planning meetings. That saying never really made much sense to me at the time.

After years of helping companies develop products I came to really understand what it meant: that you're willing to stand behind your own products. I started to understand that it's a way of demonstrating to others that if you're willing to use the products you're developing and selling, so should they. And I started to understand how important it is for companies to use their own products, especially start ups and companies developing in product areas outside their core offerings.

Wikipedia's entry for “Eat Your Own Dog Food” defines the phrase as “Eating one's own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company uses the products that it makes. Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.”

Whenever I think of the saying “Eat Your Own Dog Food” it makes me wonder why Amazon doesn’t use their own CDN, CloudFront, for their web site.

Today Amazon uses Akamai’s CDN.

Does Amazon not use its own products because there’s a confidence issue?

When you visit the Amazon Web Services web site (http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront), here’s what they say about their CloudFront Content Delivery Services – “Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.”

If CloudFront delivers the best possible performance, why wouldn’t Amazon use it themselves? Is it one of the factors I wrote about in my blog entry on Risk, or could it be one of the other factors I wrote about in Web Site Acceleration: All Content Delivery Networks Are Not the Same, Part 1 and Part 2?

There are only two top web sites that use Amazon’s Cloudfront. Twitter is one of them. How do you convince a company like Twitter to use your CDN services, when your own company doesn’t use them?

There has to be some reason Amazon isn't “Eating Their Own Dog Food” and using CloudFront. Is it confidence? Or are their other reasons?