Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. Amazon Web Services

Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.

Incentivized

Amazon CloudFront is the perfect solution for any type of company. If a company is small or medium size, CloudFront offers 1 TB monthly free bandwidth which is more than for any small and medium size companies. If we compare the speed of CloudFront with other CDN, CloudFront is way ahead of their competitors and with 1 TB free bandwidth. If someone is ready to invest time in CloudFront documentation then he/she definitely go for it.

Incentivized

This is something that is actually common across most cloud providers. A comprehensive understanding of one's use cases, constraints and future directions is key to determining if you even need a cloud solution. If you are a 2-person startup developing something with a best-scenario audience of 1k DAU in a year, you would very likely best served by a dirt-cheap dedicated Linux server somewhere (and your options to graduate to a cloud solution will still be open). If, however, you are a bigger fish, and/or you are actively considering build-vs-buy decisions for complicated, highly-loaded, six-figure requests per minute systems, global loadbalancing, extreme growth projections - then MAYBE you solve all or part of it with a cloud provider. And depending on your taste for risk, reliability, flexibility, track record - it might be AWS.

Incentivized

• Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
• Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
• Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.

Incentivized

• if a website’s static data are based in New York City, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San Francisco or Tokyo. The farther away customers are from a company’s data center, the slower the website or application loads. This problem can be fixed with a content delivery network like Amazon CloudFront
• When a visitor requests a file from your website, Amazon CloudFront automatically sends the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times.
• You may have great hosting but it doesn’t have the capacity or scalability offered by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. The better CDNs like Amazon CloudFront offer higher availability, lower network latency and lower packet loss.
• Amazon CloudFront provides 24/7 email and phone support
• Amazon CloudFront Free Tier allows you to free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.

Incentivized

• During the month-end, we experience high resource utilization; however, with AWS's scalability, we can effectively tackle the peak load.
• With AWS IAM, we don't need to set up complete infrastructure for identity and access management, as AWS provides end-to-end IAM services.
• With AWS, development has become very easy as it's very quick to spin up and destroy the environment, which saves costs.

Incentivized

• The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.

Incentivized

• Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
• The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
• Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper

Incentivized

• When there is any misconfiguration of EC2 related to SSM Connect. It doesn't clearly states that what particular configuration is missing.
• Debugging networking related issues could be improved.
• From the security group page, it's difficult to determine which resource a security group is associated with.

Incentivized

We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.

Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.

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AWS offers a wide range of powerful services that cater to various business needs which is significant strength. The ability to scale resources on-demand is a major advantage making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. The sheer volume of options and configurations can be overwhelming for new users leading to a steep learning curve. While functional the AWS management console can feel cluttered and less intuitive compared to some competitors which can hinder navigation. Although some documentation lacks clarity and practical examples which can frustrate users trying to implement specific solutions.

Incentivized

Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.

AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.

Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.

Incentivized

CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.

Incentivized

The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to
immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a
good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of
company because of its affordability and ease of use.

Incentivized

The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.

We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.

Incentivized

Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.

Amazon Web Services fits best for all levels of organisations like startup, mid level or enterprise. The services are easy to use and doesn't require a high level of understanding as you can learn via blogs or youtube videos. AWS is Reasonable in cost as the plan is pay as you use.

Incentivized

• Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
• With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.

Incentivized

• RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
• It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.

Incentivized

• Using Amazon Web Services has allowed us to develop and deploy new SAAS solutions quicker than we did when we used traditional web hosting. This has allowed us to grow our service offerings to clients and also add more value to our existing services.
• Having AWS deployed has also allowed our development team to focus on delivering high-quality software without worrying about whether our servers will be able to handle the demand. Since AWS allows you to adjust your server needs based on demand, we can easily assign a faster server instance to ease and improve service without the client even knowing what we did.

Incentivized