Akamai CDN vs. Amazon CloudFront vs. IBM Cloud Internet Services

Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.

Incentivized

Amazon CloudFront is best suited when there is a need of speed in serving static and dynanic web contents of a web application. If the content is already in that edge location, CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not currently in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server. Amazon CloudFront is not appropriate in case users can tolerate some delays or servers are present near to the location of user. It also Integrates through the W3 Total Cache plugin. Amazon CloudFront Pricing based on bandwidth usage that's the best part of it.

Incentivized

In terms of business challenges, it simplifies the job of my engineers and significantly increases the productivity of my teams when they collaborate with IBM teams all over the world. Now that we have completed a proof-of-concept using the services supplied by IBM, we expect it to assist us in managing them more efficiently; thus far, management has been straightforward.

Incentivized

• Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
• Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
• How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .

Incentivized

• Solid CDN services, does what it says on the tin
• Lots of configuration options, which allow for different setups and pricing strategies
• Lambda@Edge integration allows for really quite complex behaviours to be executed in the cloud at the edge node itself. This means there are a huge amount of possibilities for shaping and altering traffic close to the viewer.
• Simple integration to other AWS services (e.g. S3)

Incentivized

• build servers in Power PC architecture (ppc)
• take advantage of IBM datacenters infrastructure around the world
• continue to use your apps running on AIX

Incentivized

• Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
• Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
• Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.

Incentivized

• If price is the main concern, CloudFront is not the cheapest-in-class by a wide margin
• Some of the settings are not obvious to new users, and the management dashboards could use work
• Lacks fine-grained access controls and statistical reports for usage

Incentivized

• Request proxying is done by way of DNS name resolution, which is inflexible.
• Proxy services do not work on wildcard DNS entries.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have seen faster and more user friendly interfaces like Azure

Incentivized

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

Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.

Incentivized

Have used the IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network for a very short time span like a couple of weeks. Both the setup as well as interactions with other services are a little complicated or not straightforward when compared to AWS. Also, IBM cloud has less number of edge locations than AWS Cloudfront.

Incentivized

I have used Salesforce to explore it as an app but I have found them both able to solve my needs and requirements when it comes to security. While I choose IBM Cloud Internet Services for more accessibility, a better price was available with Saleforce. Although that is just my observation.

Incentivized

• Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
• Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
• Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.

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

• Reduced security configuration time for Internet of Things applications by more than 50%
• Provided better security incident SLA for CouchDB databases via IBM Cloudant
• Reduced security verification time for CloudFoundry applications by ~15%

Incentivized