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CDN vs S3

jdorfman.posthaven.com

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Re: CDN vs S3

#31

Post by fintler »

jdorfman wrote: post #16
molecule wrote: post #15

obvious: Amazon product isn't that great @ a service that's optimally provided by another Amazon product. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

@molecule obvious to you and I. I wrote this to inform those who think it is a good idea to use S3 as a CDN, that it isn't. If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.

So why is the title of your post "CDN vs S3"? Shouldn't it be something like "Don't use S3 as a CDN"?

To be honest, your post feels like spam for MaxCDN.

Re: CDN vs S3

#32

Post by micro-ram »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #21
v13inc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Cloudfront cause the player to stop buffering the video? Does it happen with a HTTP Download distribution, or the RTMP streaming distribution? I've used both CloudFront and Akamai for serving video, and I don't remember running into those issues. I have only tested it with normal HTTP Download distributions, however.

Cloudfront serves an invalid HTTP response, thus Chrome/Firefox refuse to cache the data. The theory is, it is better to not risk caching bad data. Chrome will still play the video served from Cloudfront, but it wont write any of the data to the media cache. Thus when you pause and buffer, it will only buffer a few seconds of video in the current playback window. It never writes to the cache so buffering must stop. T…

Both buffer while paused on Chrome iOS.

Re: CDN vs S3

#33

Post by zwily »

jdorfman wrote: post #16
molecule wrote: post #15

obvious: Amazon product isn't that great @ a service that's optimally provided by another Amazon product. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

@molecule obvious to you and I. I wrote this to inform those who think it is a good idea to use S3 as a CDN, that it isn't. If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.

Honest question: Do you actually know anyone that thinks S3 is appropriate as a CDN?

Re: CDN vs S3

#34

Post by jcampbell1 »

modemuser wrote: post #29
jcampbell1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the process of abandoning Cloudfront, because they have a serious bug when serving video files. They serve HTTP 206 (Range-Get) as HTTP 1.0 but 206 didn't exist in HTTP 1.0. Chrome and Firefox treat this as "uncacheable", thus media assets bypass the local media cache. Depending on the nature of the content, Cloudfront is not usable for video, particularly the kind where people seek around a bunch, like instr…

> HTTP 1.0 If that is the only problem, flipping one bit in every response seems like a really simple solution. Why hasn't Cloudfront fixed it yet, do they know about this?

Yes they know about it. Below is the response from Amazon. The logic they employ is that since it is broken in an old version of Squid, it is fine for it to be broken on Cloudfront.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=351384&#...

- - -

Hello,

While we are aware of the issue with range request HTTP/1.0 206 responses and Chrome, we cannot provide an ETA for a fix. Since this issue is specific to range requests, an immediate workaround is to disable range requests on your origin server if this is possible for your use case.

It is also worth mentioning that multiple web proxy and cache application vendors have using HTTP/1.0 as a de facto standard for many years, so you will probably sporadically get similar reports from your end users using Chrome, but not other browsers such as Firefox or Safari. For example, here is a discussion between a Chrome developer on the mailing list for the popular Squid web cache about a similar report: http://www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-dev/201204/011... I am not saying that always returning HTTP/1.0 will stick around forever, but it is fairly common in real world situations today.

Re: CDN vs S3

#35

Post by zwily »

Icer5k wrote: post #26
philip1209 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudfront doesn't offer some services that I find necessary, such as nested directory indices (e.g. example.com/folder/ instead of example.com/folder/index.html) and it doesn't return a 404 header on missing pages. I just emailed MaxCDN to see if they provide these.

Cloudfront as a CDN supports directory indexes and 404s, it's just S3 that doesn't. If you point a CF distribution at your own server with directory indexes enabled, CF will send those through to the user.

S3 supports both of those, via its "bucket as a website" feature.

Re: CDN vs S3

#36

Post by jcampbell1 »

micro-ram wrote: post #32
jcampbell1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudfront serves an invalid HTTP response, thus Chrome/Firefox refuse to cache the data. The theory is, it is better to not risk caching bad data. Chrome will still play the video served from Cloudfront, but it wont write any of the data to the media cache. Thus when you pause and buffer, it will only buffer a few seconds of video in the current playback window. It never writes to the cache so buffering must stop. T…

Both buffer while paused on Chrome iOS.

Chrome on iOS is probably using Apple's AVPlayer, which makes sense because there is probably no other way to access the dedicated decoding hardware. Apple is not afraid to Cache an HTTP 1.0 206 response.

Re: CDN vs S3

#38

Post by corin_ »

mathrawka wrote: post #28
jdorfman wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@davidandgoliath I work for MaxCDN so I would probably get fired. =P

So you post something that basically compares apples and oranges? Honestly, this post turns me off from MaxCDN.

Agreed. Especially if he was well aware that AWS offers a comparative service, but instead chose to compare to a different one.

Re: CDN vs S3

#39

Post by jefe78 »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #14
jcastro wrote: post #12

Since this thread will likely turn into people asking about Cloudfront performance, does anyone have any real-world experience with CloudFront vs. Rackspace with Akamai CDN? On paper the Rackspace one looks like a great performance/price alternative.

I am in the process of abandoning Cloudfront, because they have a serious bug when serving video files. They serve HTTP 206 (Range-Get) as HTTP 1.0 but 206 didn't exist in HTTP 1.0. Chrome and Firefox treat this as "uncacheable", thus media assets bypass the local media cache. Depending on the nature of the content, Cloudfront is not usable for video, particularly the kind where people seek around a bunch, like instr…

You're doing something horribly wrong. I work for a live streaming company and we make extensive use of Varnish. It can probably solve the problem you're describing.

Re: CDN vs S3

#40

Post by StavrosK »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #21
v13inc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Cloudfront cause the player to stop buffering the video? Does it happen with a HTTP Download distribution, or the RTMP streaming distribution? I've used both CloudFront and Akamai for serving video, and I don't remember running into those issues. I have only tested it with normal HTTP Download distributions, however.

Cloudfront serves an invalid HTTP response, thus Chrome/Firefox refuse to cache the data. The theory is, it is better to not risk caching bad data. Chrome will still play the video served from Cloudfront, but it wont write any of the data to the media cache. Thus when you pause and buffer, it will only buffer a few seconds of video in the current playback window. It never writes to the cache so buffering must stop. T…

Oh is that why my Coursera videos suddenly won't buffer for more than a few seconds? I figured it was an optimization, like with YouTube, so they don't waste bandwidth loading videos for people who have the tabs open but won't watch them.

Do you know of any workarounds client-side?

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