Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. Google Cloud CDN

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.

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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.

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Google Cloud CDN is available globally and supports various load balancers available in different regions around the globe, so I find Google Cloud CDN as one of the best choices for CDN as it serves globally and it is really fast, safe, and secure. It might be not suitable for you if you do not have any technical background.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• The intelligent categorization and management of site content cache in Google Cloud CDN is unique and offers the best results with simple settings.
• It has powerful servers in all geographical regions of the world and the speed of the site will increase many times for the customer with smart routing.
• It has AnyCast IP feature and website receives a single global IP address. In this case, the site loads at the same speed worldwide.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• Unable to use any kind of code to show different content.
• Absence of cloud workers as provided by Cloudfront, Cloudflare and Akamai.
• No support for dynamic routing.

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

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There is not really an interface for managing rules directly, compared to market leaders, Google's implementation is probably strong on the technical side but for the average user it might be lacking. There are no advanced features which can be compared to what other leaders in the CDN sector are providing or they can be achieved but with high implementation cost and usage of other products in the Google Cloud suite

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.

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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.

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I didn't have the need to use support from Google when I was either testing or setting up my website. Information was easily found by searching online if I needed to, and the options that I needed to install or enable were there on the setup page. Honestly, I was a former systems administrator so most of this stuff is not challenging for me.

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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.

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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.

We have limited software developers and don't have the need for a big cloud service provider along with their costs. Google Cloud CDN brings to usr, reliability and brand familiarity. Google Cloud CDN also doesn't bother us with pitches or 1000 emails about the products. We went and signed up for it, without dealing with a pushy salesperson.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Google Cloud CDN has worked great as a tool to provide more reliable and faster interactive web experiences such as with e-learning sites.
• The product can require additional training costs, even for experienced IT administrators.
• Overall, ongoing costs can also be prohibitive for organizations with smaller web presences.

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