Likelihood to Recommend The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology. Support for many types of media, including video. Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple. Read full review Content delivery across all continents Web & media acceleration Web application firewall Backend geo-availability Reporting & access metrics Read full review Cons WAF is hard to configure. No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade. Account access controls are extremely limited. Read full review Better control over origin caching Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management TLS & Cipher Control Faster publishing or change updates Read full review Alternatives Considered It’s the fastest and most configurable.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs. Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated. Read full review 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%. Read full review ScreenShots