What users are saying about

Amazon CloudFront vs Azure CDN

Amazon CloudFront

26 Ratings

Azure CDN

6 Ratings

Amazon CloudFront

26 Ratings
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Score 9 out of 101

Based on 26 reviews and ratings

Azure CDN

6 Ratings
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Score 9.2 out of 101

Based on 6 reviews and ratings

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Likelihood to Recommend

Amazon CloudFront

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.

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Ashish Agarwal
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Azure CDN

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
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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
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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
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Cons

  • Amazon CloudFront can improve the security of the files that are being delivered from edge locations.
  • Amazon CloudFront should increase the number of edge location around the world for high data availability
  • you will probably get better performance and price of Amazon CloudFront when you are hosting your web servers in EC2

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Ashish Agarwal
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  • The primary complaint I had with the CDN was expiring content once it was distributed. I realize it doesn't make sense for each endpoint to refresh content frequently, however if you upload something and need to make a tweak and then upload it again, you are kinda stuck. The only option at that point is to rename the content, which doesn't help if you've already distributed a link. It would be nice if you could upload new content to the source and force a refresh.
  • I would like to see more granular folder permissions. For instance, if I only wanted a single CDN but wanted to have folders for different divisions (marketing, hr, training, etc...) it would be nice to be able to get an access key at the folder level instead of the CDN level.
  • Content cannot be stored at the root of the CDN, you must have it inside a folder. This isn't a huge deal on a brand new setup but if you are moving from a prior CDN to Azure and already have content at the root, it makes that transition more difficult.

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Andrew Mills
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Alternatives Considered

Amazon CloudFront free Tier allows up to 50 GB of data transfer per month which is not there in any of the above. Amazon CloudFront provides detailed reporting around the most frequently used objects, monitoring and usage charts. Amazon CloudFront is suitable to help you deliver both static and dynamic content, including streaming. CloudFlare is not an actual CDN, but more of a reverse proxy that takes over all of your traffic and then serves cached versions of your content whenever possible and from a nearby location.Amazon CloudFront provides advanced security features and geo restriction. CloudFront is using Super PoP approach, which means much fewer (edge) locations, compared to the thousands that Akamai has around the world. This is why CloudFront costs less than Akamai.

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Ashish Agarwal
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We did not evaluate any other CDN's before we selected Azure. We heavily use Azure for our development and infrastructure efforts so choosing the Azure CDN was easy. The only thing we compared it to was standing up a Windows Server VM and pointing a CDN URL to it allowing it to serve as a file server, which was much more cumbersome.

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Andrew Mills
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Return on Investment

  • Occasionally a generated image will fail, and we need to manually bust the cache in order for the fixed image to surface, but overall it has been an asset to the company.

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Chris Barretto
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  • The speed at which we could stand up the CDN and push content made this significantly faster than putting together our own file server and pointing a CDN URL to it. The ease of management, from a plethora of free tools, allowed me to quickly get users up to speed on both Windows and Mac based PC's.

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Andrew Mills
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Pricing Details

Amazon CloudFront

General
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Entry-level set up fee?
No
Additional Pricing Details
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Azure CDN

General
Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No
Additional Pricing Details
—