Google Cloud CDN vs. Azure Front Door vs. StackPath Edge Delivery

Google Cloud CDN is available globally and supports various load balancers available in different regions around the globe, so I find Google Cloud CDN as one of the best choices for CDN as it serves globally and it is really fast, safe, and secure. It might be not suitable for you if you do not have any technical background.

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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.

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Well suited to:

1. Startups - Very competitive pricing, better than AWS for object storage and CDN.
2. The less technical - for those looking to implement a CDN, it doesn't get any easier than StackPath
3. The more technical - Well documented API, serverless scripting and container deployments
4. Fast object delivery - StackPath tends to be faster (sometimes much more ) than AWS S3. See below however...

Not so well suited to:

1. Multi-tiered web applications
2. Ultra high bandwidth requirements. Stackpath isn't meant to be a substitute for AWS or Azure when you're looking to push 100s of TBs of traffic.
3. Object storage works well if you don't need fine-grained bucket lifecycle or permissions management.

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• The intelligent categorization and management of site content cache in Google Cloud CDN is unique and offers the best results with simple settings.
• It has powerful servers in all geographical regions of the world and the speed of the site will increase many times for the customer with smart routing.
• It has AnyCast IP feature and website receives a single global IP address. In this case, the site loads at the same speed worldwide.

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• Content delivery across all continents
• Web & media acceleration
• Web application firewall
• Backend geo-availability
• Reporting & access metrics

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• Price competitive.
• Easy to use.
• Good reporting.
• Quick to deploy.
• Start-up friendly.
• Good technical information via blog, FAQ and community discussion.
• I can talk to real person for urgent support.

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• Unable to use any kind of code to show different content.
• Absence of cloud workers as provided by Cloudfront, Cloudflare and Akamai.
• No support for dynamic routing.

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• Better control over origin caching
• Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management
• TLS & Cipher Control
• Faster publishing or change updates

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• Analytics.
• Many options hidden in API.
• Web console.

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There is not really an interface for managing rules directly, compared to market leaders, Google's implementation is probably strong on the technical side but for the average user it might be lacking. There are no advanced features which can be compared to what other leaders in the CDN sector are providing or they can be achieved but with high implementation cost and usage of other products in the Google Cloud suite

I didn't have the need to use support from Google when I was either testing or setting up my website. Information was easily found by searching online if I needed to, and the options that I needed to install or enable were there on the setup page. Honestly, I was a former systems administrator so most of this stuff is not challenging for me.

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We have limited software developers and don't have the need for a big cloud service provider along with their costs. Google Cloud CDN brings to usr, reliability and brand familiarity. Google Cloud CDN also doesn't bother us with pitches or 1000 emails about the products. We went and signed up for it, without dealing with a pushy salesperson.

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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.

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When we identified the need for having a Content Delivery Network to improve our website loading performance we researched a bit and found StackPath. Reading its reviews and the info on its website we have found that they had everything we needed so we didn't need to look for other products.

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• Google Cloud CDN has worked great as a tool to provide more reliable and faster interactive web experiences such as with e-learning sites.
• The product can require additional training costs, even for experienced IT administrators.
• Overall, ongoing costs can also be prohibitive for organizations with smaller web presences.

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• 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%.

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• Easy 25-30% improvement in website performance vs non CDN solution
• Less expensive and faster object storage than AWS
• Aided greatly in maintaining KPIs in terms of performance, availability

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