Alibaba Cloud CDN delivers content to users from the nodes that are nearest them, accelerating the response to user requests and increasing the response rate. CDN also resolves the delivery latency problem that is usually caused by distribution, bandwidth, and server performance issues. CDN has been applied in multiple scenarios, including site acceleration, on-demand streaming, and live streaming.
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Azure Front Door
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that helps users deliver high performance, scalability, and a secure user experiences for content and applications. It includes a customizable rules engine for advanced routing capabilities. It boasts instant scalability with global HTTP load balancing and failover.
$35
per month
Pricing
Alibaba Cloud CDN
Azure Front Door
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Standard
$35
per month
Premium
$330
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Alibaba Cloud CDN
Azure Front Door
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Base fees (Billed hourly and only for number of hours used)
Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
Alibaba Cloud CDN is very cost-efficient and faster in some cases than the competitors. It also provides the latest documentation, so you don't have to go through hundred of pages of decade-old documentation like some of the competitors. Along with that they provides state of the art analytics and insights platform which makes the decision making process smooth.
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
