Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/2016/04/18/google-cdn-beta-is-here-and-it-brings-more-than-meets-the-eye/

by forcer • 10 years ago

351 99 10 years ago

blog.speedchecker.xyz

jwineman• 10 years ago

Why don't you compare Google's CDN to CloudFlare?

boulos9• 10 years ago

I'm not the OP, but I'm not sure why they included MaxCDN and Fastly but not (at least) CloudFlare's free service.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (though I had nothing to do with this service).

forcer4• 10 years ago

OP here: You are right, CloudFlare would have been nice and in retrospect we should have added it. I think it would have fared quite nicely as during all the tests we do on regular basis its doing really well.

tomsmeding• 10 years ago

Seems ironic that the linked site doesn't load (at least for me)

boulos9• 10 years ago

Nothing beats an uncached WordPress blog ;).

yeukhon• 10 years ago

Even if cached, most self-hosted WP can't handle HN visitor volume :-)

anacleto• 10 years ago

So bad.

celsius82• 10 years ago

It's working again.

sp332• 10 years ago

I can make a fast CDN too, if it doesn't have any users yet!

rmdoss2• 10 years ago

I was going to say that :) When you are starting and have very few users, you should be fast.

It is very hard to keep it very fast when you have millions of free users, like CloudFlare does. That is impressive.

wstrange3• 10 years ago

I'd assume Google knows a thing or two about scaling content

pbarnes_19• 10 years ago

Does Gmail count as enough users? ;)

avita1• 10 years ago

It's not about the number of users, it's about the amount of unique content.

imaginenore• 10 years ago

Mirror: http://archive.is/HVpTz

chrisbolt• 10 years ago

Cloud CDN is Google’s own CDN solution for sites running in VMs inside Compute Engine. It is designed and implemented a bit differently from other CDNs, since it is meant to cache not only static content, but practically a whole site in more than 50 edge caches globally.

I'm not seeing what's so special here. Other CDNs can do whole-site acceleration and caching (Akamai Sureroute, EdgeCast ADN).

It is a whole new take in the concept of CDNs, going way further than simply caching files, since it is directly integrated into their Load Balancing system and it literally means that a copy of your site will be running and serving from the closest location to your customers, with a single public IP address thanks to Anycast.

This makes it sound like Google is magically making your GCE instances run in each of their POPs. What if those instances need to share state? What happens when a page does 10 SQL queries to a server halfway around the world?

boulos9• 10 years ago

That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own landing page (https://cloud.google.com/cdn/) actually makes this clear: there are caches at the edge, but we (currently) deeply understand your origin (our compute engine VMs) and don't require any funny modification to your setup (just click a button) or look any different than your existing anycast IP for L7 Load Balancing.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not this (so I only sort of know what I'm talking about).

pbarnes_19• 10 years ago

It would be nice if you guys supported external origins, but I understand the reasons for not doing so. :D

Edit: Any chance you could ask Cedexis to add GCDN to these reports: http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=dsa&country=US&date=...

nikolay12• 10 years ago

"We deeply understand" - the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

forcer4• 10 years ago

OP Here> The setup was as follows: VM instance in each of the 4 cloud regions around the world:

Council Bluffs, IA (us-central1) Berkeley County, SC (us-east1) St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1) Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)

So on any cache miss at one of the 50+ edge POPs, the cloud HTTP(S) load balancer will direct the request to the nearest cloud region. The resulting cache fill happens over Google's global network, which is fast. Once that cache fill happens, that edge cache can serve the content directly to clients, which is even faster.

pbarnes_19• 10 years ago

Google Cloud CDN is 'just' a dynamic site accelerator (with nice GCP integration), like all other CDNs.

I think the author of this blog post is trying to simplify the explanation (or just doesn't understand). No 'copy' of your site is running on the closest location. GCE is not available in all POPs.

These results would look very different if EC ADN was included. And not including CloudFlare is a bit strange.

Both EC and CF run Anycast CDNs. This is still a really cool thing for Google to release because it's nice to have more competition in the space.

I've run some prelim tests on pure route latency from 90+ worldwide locations and GC-CDN (? :) is pretty evenly matched with CF/EC.

The real test would be end to end HTTP request latency and this is where GC-CDN would probably beat out CF (since you're on the Google net from POP to GCE DC, which is nice and fast, whereas CF talks to your origin over the public Internet). EC ADN is symmetric (POP to POP is on-net) so probably more comparable.

ddorian432• 10 years ago

Cloudflare has interconnect with google:

https://www.cloudflare.com/google/

FussyZeus• 10 years ago

Anyone want to start a pool on how long until Google shuts it down when it doesn't end up as #1 in the market?

boulos9• 10 years ago

I'll take the other side of your bets. How much are you in for?

harryh• 10 years ago

Kudos to you good sir for calling someone out and putting your wallet on the line. I hope the other guy comes through and you get a friendly wager going.

tacos2• 10 years ago

You can't have a convincing cloud story without CDN. I'm an Azure guy but Google's investment here is clear. I'll take that bet.

bigiain• 10 years ago

Sure it makes business sense for Google to do this, but you've gotta admit to having that same reservation for every new Google service.

Would you build a business model that relies on a brand new Google service?

Hell no - give it a few years, and wait to see if the "customer support" consists of hundreds of other suckers who've gone all-in complaining to each other on the public forums, with not even the original 20% time Gooogler bothering to read or respond to anything...

It's just happened too often. (And I know Nest and Revolv aren't "Google" as such, but they're definitely run by "Googlers" and are under the same adult supervision, so it's not even like you can say "sure, they _used_ to be like that...")

rplnt• 10 years ago

So just radical changes to pricing then? And cutting of features of course.

Blackthorn• 10 years ago

I'll take the opposite side of this. What are the terms?

ddorian432• 10 years ago

Question: How do cdns serve/shard data ? Meaning, in a pop, there are say 100 nodes, and all of them cache some data, say by hashing the path /ayb.jpg.

Does the loadbalancer (say, haproxy) know which node should-have the file cached ? Or there is random loadbalancing and each node get's the data from the other nodes (using the same hash)? Just like openstack-swift (there are proxy that serve http-requests, and data nodes that have files).

cortesoft• 10 years ago

Probably each CDN does it differently... but the one I know about does the second.... so it goes LB, first webserver on random node, and that first webserver knows where to grab the content from the second webserver on the proper node that has the content.

tsmith84• 10 years ago

Most CDN have a pile of patents that show how they do their cache hierarchy.

-Ex CDN worker

oldgun• 10 years ago

Good. Now when will Google shut down this service?

throwaway_1010• 10 years ago

Never. As always. DVMB.

This is not green field, but as the neighbor's lawn next to mine, it may or may not be greener. Time and fertilizer will tell. Smell the dirt Spartans.

Ensorceled• 10 years ago

"it's already one of the fastest" ... wouldn't we expect a new service, with lots of empty cache tables and available free ram, to be faster than the established players?

coliveira• 10 years ago

This comment is spot-on.

azazqadir5• 10 years ago

They need to show some benchmarks of load testing for this comparison to be fair.

dalore• 10 years ago

Empty cache tables means lower hits so slower.

rkuykendall-com• 10 years ago

I think the parent meant the cache tables of each node are empty (not many users yet), so the tested apps will be able to have relatively large cache tables on those nodes, since they aren't getting LRU'd out by other users.

So the cache table for a tested app is fuller because the cache table overall is emptier.

rmdoss2• 10 years ago

Would love to see CloudFlare added to the mix. In fact, I would love to see Incapsula, Sucuri and KeyCDN compared as well, to get all top players compared.

I guess I might be asking too much :)

forcer4• 10 years ago

OP Here> yes, omission on our part. CloudFlare is very popular and even more so on HackerNews. We should have added it. There are simply too many CDNs to put into one post/chart and still make the article interesting. You can sign up to our blog to get more information which does not necessarily becomes trending on HN or elsewhere.

lukasm• 10 years ago

Don't use it if you have customers in China. They won't be able to access it.

PunchTornado2• 10 years ago

are you sure? everyone has customers in China.

philliphaydon• 10 years ago

I'm not sure you understand his comment.

sams99• 10 years ago

Something that is unclear to me here, can I origin pull from anywhere? or is this purely for compute engine now?

Regarding free SSL are we talking SNI here or is this free non SNI HTTPS hosting?

boulos9• 10 years ago

Right now it's just compute engine (Source: cloud.google.com/cdn). I'm not sure on the SNI part, but like you I assume that's the case.

Edit: Nope! A little birdie pointed out to me that since "each HTTP(S) LB gets its own Anycast VIP, so there's no need for SNI."

mvitorino• 10 years ago

That's right, since it is based on the global load balancing tech, you get a single IP for all edge locations which means you can use your own custom SSL (without the need for SNI) at no extra cost (which would cost you $500/month on AWS CloudFront).

Animats• 10 years ago

Of course, if it's in beta, and the infrastructure has been built out but not yet heavily loaded, the performance may be unusually good.

(We see this every time the cellular industry rolls out a new band nobody is using yet, and the review sites talk about how great the bandwidth is.)

lolobkk2• 10 years ago

Google CDN looks very similar to what Cloudflare Free Plan offers. A no-Frills, fully automated setup with little or no control on how your content is being delivered. Main difference with Cloudflare being that Google forces you to use GCP as Origin and you have to pay for the CDN service (Bandwidth, purge, requests...) which Cloudflare offers for free and you can use any Origin server.

Not sure why someone would use Google CDN when you can get the same for free with Cloudflare. Moreover, Cloudflare provides Security up to L7 with WAF whereas Google Cloud has no Security features. Anybody know how DDoS (L3/4) mitigation works on Google CDN?

Now if you want control and the ability to set up your own policies (Cache Control Headers, redirect, complex cache key manipulation, etc...), Google Cloud is not going to be what you need, at least for the time being and you would be better of with EdgeCast or Akamai. Faslty is an interesting option too but their network is very small compare to EdgeCast or Akamai. Fastly is about 1Tbps of capacity whereas Akamai or EdgeCast are > 20Tbps.

PS: Akamai is not IP Anycast based

mgw• 10 years ago

I don't know if Google does this, but because they control both endpoints (cache server and load balancer) of the longest section of the path they could accelerate it by replace HTTP(S) there with something like CloudFlare's Railgun. [1]

Since Railgun is only available at CloudFlare plans starting at $200/month, this could make the Google offering attractive for certain customers.

In any case, it is hard to beat free for most sites with moderate needs.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun/

jamescun• 10 years ago

I just naturally assumed Akamai would use anycast for their CDN, but it is actually DNS based[1].

No mention of if their DNS is anycasted, one would presume so.

[1] https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/04/serving-at-the-edge-good-fo...

Pirate-of-SV• 10 years ago

Would be cool if you could add an image of the table with average measured times by country for the selection of european countries. (Marked with double asterisk in the post)

I guess the difference between these countries could be noticeable.

Alternatively you could post it here. I'm mainly interested in the Swedish numbers.

kevinSuttle• 10 years ago

I wonder if they're using Brotli. http://9to5google.com/2016/01/20/chrome-brotli-compression-l...

pbarnes_19• 10 years ago

If anyone wants to poke this, I've set up 2 micro instances in each GCP zone and put the GCDN in front here:

http://httpbin-gcdn.xyz/

It's quite smart and pushes traffic to the right zone:

https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca...

Very cool stuff.

Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs

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