Amazon CloudFront vs Azure CDN

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for engineers who know what they're doing, but you don't want to bug an engineer every time you want to update an image asset. The process of uploads and invalidations can be too complex for non-technical staff, which can bottleneck content delivery and updates.

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Matthew Gardner

Co-Founder

RouteThisComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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If you are looking for a secure, easy to manage, solution to store and distribute your content around the US and/or world, the Azure CDN may be the right solution. The only thing I would caution users on is that once your content is published and distributed it cannot be easily refreshed on the endpoints. Instead, you are at the mercy of the default time to live when the content was first uploaded.

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Andrew Mills

Senior Software Developer

Seventy Seven EnergyOil & Energy, 1001-5000 employees

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Pros

Reduces requests to S3
Easy integration into our platform
Easy scalability to add more servers

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Chris Barretto

CTO

CureusPublishing, 1-10 employees

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I found the CDN very easy to setup and configure within the Azure Portal.
Being Azure, there are plenty of free tools that allow you to manage the CDN from a UI that is not the portal. This was especially handy when I trained end users how to manage content within their specific realm.

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Andrew Mills

Senior Software Developer

Seventy Seven EnergyOil & Energy, 1001-5000 employees

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Cons

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

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Unlike Cloudfront, Azure CDN does not yet support WebSockets.
Limited options for deploying endpoints that support authentication.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

CloudFront is well-suited for a particular use case with its native tie-ins to other Amazon/AWS services, like S3. If choosing from a platform-specific CDN, we tend to go with whichever CDN is available for use on that platform (e.g. Google or Azure). In rare cases we might suggest a lower-cost CDN for use cases where the cost of bandwidth is of top importance, but these cases tend to be unusual.

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Azure CDN is very similar to other CDN choices -- we generally choose it when the decision to deploy with Microsoft Azure has already been made and the software architecture requires a CDN. Because Azure CDN is very similar to choices from a number of other vendors, we usually choose it when its tie-ins with other Azure services is the key benefit.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Reduces the load of main application servers, meaning fewer active resources in use on EC2, ElasticBeanstalk, etc, saving money
Greatly speeds up page loads for users, when configured correctly (like any CDN)

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Azure CDN reduced origin instance load by removing the need to constantly serve large numbers of static files, meaning applications can be deployed with smaller/fewer instances.
Azure CDN reduces apparent load times to customers by serving cached files out of POPs in the local region of those clients, instead of requiring those clients to make multiple, lengthy requests through to the origin servers.

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Verified User

Director in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Amazon CloudFront vs Azure CDN