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Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

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Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.

I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon! Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd s…

Last time I priced out AWS, Azure and GCE, Azure was by far the most expensive - by a long shot - at least for our usage.

I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#63
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Gmail count as enough users? ;)

It's not about the number of users, it's about the amount of unique content.

Gmail is all about unique content. That's why Gmail search is slower than web search.

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#64
Of course, if it's in beta, and the infrastructure has been built out but not yet heavily loaded, the performance may be unusually good.

(We see this every time the cellular industry rolls out a new band nobody is using yet, and the review sites talk about how great the bandwidth is.)

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#65
Google CDN looks very similar to what Cloudflare Free Plan offers. A no-Frills, fully automated setup with little or no control on how your content is being delivered. Main difference with Cloudflare being that Google forces you to use GCP as Origin and you have to pay for the CDN service (Bandwidth, purge, requests...) which Cloudflare offers for free and you can use any Origin server.

Not sure why someone would use Google CDN when you can get the same for free with Cloudflare. Moreover, Cloudflare provides Security up to L7 with WAF whereas Google Cloud has no Security features. Anybody know how DDoS (L3/4) mitigation works on Google CDN?

Now if you want control and the ability to set up your own policies (Cache Control Headers, redirect, complex cache key manipulation, etc...), Google Cloud is not going to be what you need, at least for the time being and you would be better of with EdgeCast or Akamai. Faslty is an interesting option too but their network is very small compare to EdgeCast or Akamai. Fastly is about 1Tbps of capacity whereas Akamai or EdgeCast are > 20Tbps.

PS: Akamai is not IP Anycast based

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#66
post #36
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own landing page ( https://cloud.google.com/cdn/ ) actually makes this clear: there are caches at the edge, but we (currently) deeply understand your origin (our compute engine VMs) and don't require any funny modification to your setup (just click a button) or look any different than your existing anycast IP for L7 Load Balancing. Disclaimer: I w…

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

Good point. Isn't the Fastly VCL configuration proprietary? What if you need to move to another CDN?

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#67
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks,…

Honest question: Have you actually used GCE for any length of time? Having used both AWS and GCE, and I vastly prefer GCE. It is simply easier to use and offers better price/performance.

Easier to use? If you understand "cloud computing" as "VMs in the cloud" than Digital Ocean is much cheaper and easiest to use. To me, "a cloud" is a few steps beyond just the rudimentary VM hosting - I get a lot of services from AWS that I need to implement and maintain myself with GCE or other cloud vendors. Okay, I agree, Google is catching up, but AWS is still years ahead with things like CloudFormation, OpsWorks, ElastiCache, RDS, Elastic Transcoder, WAS, SQS, and the likes.

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#68
post #66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

Good point. Isn't the Fastly VCL configuration proprietary? What if you need to move to another CDN?

Sorry, I had to clarify: VCL [0] stands for "Varnish Configuration Language", i.e. you can move to another CDN that supports VCL (although I'm not aware of any other) or move to your own Varnish servers.

[0]: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#69
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks,…

Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.

As others have pointed out, Google's CDN does not have as many users and content as other CDN services yet. So, of course it is faster than others.

Re: Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

#70
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irony = their site is on CF. $ whois speedchecker.xyz Domain Name: SPEEDCHECKER.XYZ Name Server: LEE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM Name Server: PAM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM

I think the OP just added CloudFlare when the site was overloaded earlier...

yes. That is true. We did not expected the post will get that popular. Unfortunately, it was all done too late. What helped us the most was that blog is hosted on DigitalOcean VPS. We scaled up to the most powerful instance and instantly the blog was back. Kudos to DigitalOcean, it saved our bacon big time today :)
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