Today Amazon launched the beta version of its content delivery network service called CloudFront that aims at taking the company into the same club as Akamai and Limelight.

In contrast to other CDNs, CloudFront is described as “a self-service, pay-as-you-go web service for content delivery.” Amazon will charge a usage-based fee, rather than a long-term contract that hopes to bring CDN to smaller web publishers who don’t have the scale to negotiate lower prices.

“(CloudFront) provides low latency, inexpensive content delivery and simple integration with Amazon S3 — without complex sales negotiations or up-front commitments.” said Amazon.com Vice President Adam Selipsky.

In the beginning, CloudFront supports HTTP only delivery from a total of 14 worldwide locations (8 in the U.S., 4 in Europe and 2 in Asia.) Pricing for the new service starts at $0.17/GB for content delivered in the U.S. and $0.21/GB for content delivered in Asia. Additionally, Amazon also charges a fee of $0.01 per 10,000 requests for content in the U.S. and $0.012 per 10,000 requests outside.

The lowest pricing tier is at $0.09/GB obtainable when customer reaches 150 TB of content delivery per month for U.S. Like the other Amazon Web Services, the new offering requires no contracts, no minimum commits and no overages.

There are already some early customers of CloudFront including Woot, Dallas-based vendor for delivery of product photos to shoppers and PlayFish, a London, UK-based producer of online games.