IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network vs. Azure Front Door

The IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network is well suited for web applications that have a distributed worldwide audience. Modern web sites load a lot of assets, such as javascript and css, that can be sped up significantly with it.

Incentivized

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

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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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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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• It has reduced load on our servers so we can reallocate server resources to our web app
• IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network has sped up response times for our app and made customers happier

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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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