Google has quietly launched a CDN

http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/09/google-cloud-cdn/

by prostoalex • 11 years ago

132 42 11 years ago

venturebeat.com

akurilin• 11 years ago

I couldn't quite find this, but what domain are these files going to be served from?

dorfsmay2• 11 years ago

Usually you created CNAMEs from your domain to your CDN's.

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

Is it best practice to use a separate domain for CDN because of cookies?

Eg: examplecdn.com instead of cdn.example.com

bajsejohannes• 11 years ago

s/Akamai competitor/CDN

dang• 11 years ago

Done.

cagenut• 11 years ago

Not to rag on the offering, but the headline is just not right. This is a CloudFront competitor not an Akamai competitor. Its a very rigid barebones product at a low margin via self-serv tooling.

mkj• 11 years ago

Google's reach of "Edge Caches" seems closer to Akamai's than CloudFront's though - lots of indivdual ISPs have them.

jdub2• 11 years ago

I have pretty strong doubts that the Google Cloud Platform team would have convinced the broader organisation to host customer stuff on their mission critical caches.

As I understand it, there's not a lot of dogfooding (let alone cooperation!) between GCP and Google.

forcer• 11 years ago

There is big difference in GGC edges and CDN they "announced" 800+ vs 30. Most likely they will keep the GGC cache just for google services like Youtube and wont offer it through their public CDN.

(The 800+ is just estimate based on research we did recently, Google does not reveal publicly how many edges on GGC they have , more here http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/2015/11/30/demystifying-google-... )

c0nducktr• 11 years ago

If we're discussing headlines, can "has quietly X" stop already?

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

The best part about it, I automatically write to three caches whenever I write to GAE datastore. One to the instance, one to memcache and one to Google's edge cache. It's just part of the GAE api, you get it for free.

alooPotato2• 11 years ago

Do you have a link that support your third assertion? How does writing to the GAE datastore also put the entity into the edge cache?

lopatin• 11 years ago

I'm sure it's a great service. I found it a little funny that this is a CDN that is "not [yet] recommended for production use".

illumen• 11 years ago

It's also kind of funny that it's available in limited regions.

Alpha, is what the Article says. Which means not ready, and changing in development quite a lot.

boundlessdreamz• 11 years ago

Limited only to service hosted in GCE unlike cloudfront which is a huge limitation. My guess is that there are more non-aws cloudfront customers than aws ones

SimeVidas• 11 years ago

Is this the CDN used for AMP pages?

nikolay• 11 years ago

Articles like these tell a lot about the level of competence of the common journos. There are many CDNs and there's Akamai. Huge difference! This is not even a Fastly competitor!

joshmn• 11 years ago

Wanna hear about the journalist who said that WordPress wasn't capable of handling 50k requests? And that proper caching is useless? And that static site generators were the way to go because it couldn't? And that caching doesn't make things static? And that jekyll is designed to be used on windows, but not the "500 gems" it installs?

I digress.

tszming2• 11 years ago

The issue with Google launching these services is you don't know when they was/will be blocked in China. Not really a global competitor to CloudFront/Azure IMHO.

wernerb2• 11 years ago

Cloudfront is not available in China. We had to implement a small CDN for a large ecommerce website. What we did was use geo-ip route 53 and route chinese ips to load balanced nginx instances caching the cloudfront cdn.

What compounds the problem with China is that the chinese are very much used to requesting an english language variant of the webstore as its often cheaper. This circumvents the CDN however as all stateful requests are routed to foreign servers making their experience really slow.

Also there's the chinese web license process that you have to go through to even host a website in china.

tszming2• 11 years ago

I've a few instances in aliyun (alibaba cloud) to monitor the traffic from time to time, Cloudfront works for me now, while googleapis.com is blocked.

I cannot convince myself not to use a politically neutral company (or China friendly) like AWS, Azure.. when I am considering the CDN service.

buro9• 11 years ago

This is not an Akamai competitor.

You'll know an Akamai competitor when you see it as it will handle video and large files.

This Google offering is limited to files below 4MB, which precludes most video.

Really this is a CloudFront competitor, but even then... it is only offering a very basic set of features to do with the caching, rather than anything else CloudFront is doing.

Further, the logic of what is cached is very basic: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/load-balancing/http/cd...

This all serves one goal: Reduce your Google bill by caching more and preventing it reach the server. How it does this is extremely basic, and it has limitations (check the cache invalidation gotchas).

The best way to reduce your Google, Amazon S3, and other bills remains to use a CDN in front of it that is cheaper than the storage behind it. The basic features of that you should care about is how easy is it get stuff into cache, serve it over https:// and invalidate it at will. Advanced features should look at DDoS costs (are you paying when you get attacked?), whether there are PoPs/edges where your market is, and then anything specific to your product, though you've usually made a selection before you get this far.

Google has quietly launched a CDN

Related Stories