The issue with Google launching these services is you don't know when they was/will be blocked in China. Not really a global competitor to CloudFront/Azure IMHO.
Google has quietly launched a CDN
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Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#32This is not an Akamai competitor.
You'll know an Akamai competitor when you see it as it will handle video and large files.
This Google offering is limited to files below 4MB, which precludes most video.
Really this is a CloudFront competitor, but even then... it is only offering a very basic set of features to do with the caching, rather than anything else CloudFront is doing.
Further, the logic of what is cached is very basic: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/http/cd...
This all serves one goal: Reduce your Google bill by caching more and preventing it reach the server. How it does this is extremely basic, and it has limitations (check the cache invalidation gotchas).
The best way to reduce your Google, Amazon S3, and other bills remains to use a CDN in front of it that is cheaper than the storage behind it. The basic features of that you should care about is how easy is it get stuff into cache, serve it over https:// and invalidate it at will. Advanced features should look at DDoS costs (are you paying when you get attacked?), whether there are PoPs/edges where your market is, and then anything specific to your product, though you've usually made a selection before you get this far.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#33The issue with Google launching these services is you don't know when they was/will be blocked in China. Not really a global competitor to CloudFront/Azure IMHO.
Cloudfront is not available in China. We had to implement a small CDN for a large ecommerce website.
What we did was use geo-ip route 53 and route chinese ips to load balanced nginx instances caching the cloudfront cdn.
What compounds the problem with China is that the chinese are very much used to requesting an english language variant of the webstore as its often cheaper. This circumvents the CDN however as all stateful requests are routed to foreign servers making their experience really slow.
Also there's the chinese web license process that you have to go through to even host a website in china.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#34Articles like these tell a lot about the level of competence of the common journos. There are many CDNs and there's Akamai. Huge difference! This is not even a Fastly competitor!
Wanna hear about the journalist who said that WordPress wasn't capable of handling 50k requests? And that proper caching is useless? And that static site generators were the way to go because it couldn't? And that caching doesn't make things static? And that jekyll is designed to be used on windows, but not the "500 gems" it installs?
I digress.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cookies should be secured using the domain and path attributes. You share quite a bit of things with your CDN quite often various API keys, as well as SSL certificates unless you do not serve your main content over SSL in the first place. Most (I'm pretty sure all) CDN's give you the ability to set your own CORS policy if you see a CDN on cdn.example.com returns allow origin * then it means it's user did not set the…
I'm not sure what your comment adds and if I'm reading it right there is a lot of information that's just blatantly wrong I cant discuss your whole comment because it's long and I'm on a phone. "If you issue your auth cookies to .example.com and the / path don't be surprised why ever XSS and other client side attacks end up compromising your users, you can have 100 XSS's in your site, you can have a shitty CORS polic…
If you have XSS you can take control over many things including the browser whats your point?
Using a CDN on a sub domain will not affect the security of your cookies if you issue them properly, it should not even be a consideration given the privilege level you already grant your CDN provider.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#36Not to rag on the offering, but the headline is just not right. This is a CloudFront competitor not an Akamai competitor. Its a very rigid barebones product at a low margin via self-serv tooling.
Google's reach of "Edge Caches" seems closer to Akamai's than CloudFront's though - lots of indivdual ISPs have them.
There is big difference in GGC edges and CDN they "announced" 800+ vs 30. Most likely they will keep the GGC cache just for google services like Youtube and wont offer it through their public CDN.
(The 800+ is just estimate based on research we did recently, Google does not reveal publicly how many edges on GGC they have , more here http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/2015/11/30/demystifying-google-... )
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#37The issue with Google launching these services is you don't know when they was/will be blocked in China. Not really a global competitor to CloudFront/Azure IMHO.
Cloudfront is not available in China. We had to implement a small CDN for a large ecommerce website. What we did was use geo-ip route 53 and route chinese ips to load balanced nginx instances caching the cloudfront cdn. What compounds the problem with China is that the chinese are very much used to requesting an english language variant of the webstore as its often cheaper. This circumvents the CDN however as all sta…
I've a few instances in aliyun (alibaba cloud) to monitor the traffic from time to time, Cloudfront works for me now, while googleapis.com is blocked.
I cannot convince myself not to use a politically neutral company (or China friendly) like AWS, Azure.. when I am considering the CDN service.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many high profile websites that use the cookieless domain approach: Google, Facebook, and Reddit off the top of my head. I wouldn't say they are poorly written - it's more of a design decision to have cookies in the top-level domain.
I didn't say the sites would be poorly written, the browsers would be if they do not obey the cookie set domain and set path restrictions. And the fact that big sites use it doesn't mean that they were "well written", Google mostly issues only tracking cookies for wildcard domains like .google.com as far as private cookies go they usually would be issued for each domain individually (play.google.com etc.). Issuing au…
Ah, sorry, I misread your comment. Indeed, a browser that doesn't respect cross-domain restrictions is a poorly written browser.
My point still stands, though: the point of cookieless domains is not security, but bandwidth. And there are legitimate reasons to have top-level domain cookies - sharing authentication state between subdomains is a common example - which would prevent a subdomain from being used as a CDN, without receiving cookies.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#39s/Akamai competitor/CDN
Done.
Re: Google has quietly launched a CDN
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's reach of "Edge Caches" seems closer to Akamai's than CloudFront's though - lots of indivdual ISPs have them.
I have pretty strong doubts that the Google Cloud Platform team would have convinced the broader organisation to host customer stuff on their mission critical caches. As I understand it, there's not a lot of dogfooding (let alone cooperation!) between GCP and Google.
A small counterpoint: I saw a talk recently that discussed charging other Google teams for using GCP resources to discourage wastefulness.