CDN vs S3

http://jdorfman.posthaven.com/medium-bitcoin-660x493-dot-jpg-cdn-vs-s3

by mclarke • 13 years ago

140 79 13 years ago

jdorfman.posthaven.com

davidandgoliath2• 13 years ago

I thought this was obvious? Amazon's Cloudfront on the other hand is a CDN and works great :)

jdorfman6• 13 years ago

@davidandgoliath you would think so. But a lot of companies ignore it.

davidandgoliath2• 13 years ago

You also seem to have ignored it in your post, any reason you didn't test cloudfront?

asb• 13 years ago

If only Route53 allowed you to point the apex domain at Cloudfront (as I understand it, it's currently S3 or ELB).

tzury2• 13 years ago

You may not want to do so as:

  1) POST (and so are PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS and CONNECT) 
     are not yet supported on CloudFront.
  2) HTTPS/SSL for your own domain is not yet supported 
     on CloudFront.

getdavidhiggins• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/zeeg/status/297888975463542784

kmfrk• 13 years ago

    $ curl -I http://phaven-prod.posthaven.netdna-cdn.com/uploads%2F2013-05-17%2F20%2F3128%2FErQE0vKlNMIeNvaxbneY75nWy

    HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
    Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 20:31:08 GMT
    Content-Type: application/xml
    Connection: keep-alive
    x-amz-request-id: 41706FB9149898AF
    x-amz-id-2: d5F1JMIBLaQzNG5A

Boo. :)

jdorfman6• 13 years ago

@kmfrk

PostHaven cut off the URI:

curl -I http://phaven-prod.posthaven.netdna-cdn.com/uploads%2F2013-0... HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 18 May 2013 20:34:13 GMT Content-Type: binary/octet-stream Content-Length: 52958 Connection: keep-alive x-amz-id-2: NO6o51/19JsQJN9YHc+T/sraZSGNT+f3R+1GWl2QL3aD4SubqazjbMURb4VYaZyS x-amz-request-id: E640348D2D6EDA7B Last-Modified: Sat, 18 May 2013 00:47:10 GMT ETag: "f95534e9752b560f4acdda20228f90ba" Server: NetDNA-cache/2.2 X-Cache: HIT Accept-Ranges: bytes

geoffhill• 13 years ago

Amazon Web Services does offer a worldwide CDN, CloudFront. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

philip1209• 13 years ago

Cloudfront doesn't offer some services that I find necessary, such as nested directory indices (e.g. example.com/folder/ instead of example.com/folder/index.html) and it doesn't return a 404 header on missing pages. I just emailed MaxCDN to see if they provide these.

Icer5k2• 13 years ago

Cloudfront as a CDN supports directory indexes and 404s, it's just S3 that doesn't. If you point a CF distribution at your own server with directory indexes enabled, CF will send those through to the user.

jcastro2• 13 years ago

Since this thread will likely turn into people asking about Cloudfront performance, does anyone have any real-world experience with CloudFront vs. Rackspace with Akamai CDN?

On paper the Rackspace one looks like a great performance/price alternative.

jcampbell18• 13 years ago

I am in the process of abandoning Cloudfront, because they have a serious bug when serving video files. They serve HTTP 206 (Range-Get) as HTTP 1.0 but 206 didn't exist in HTTP 1.0. Chrome and Firefox treat this as "uncacheable", thus media assets bypass the local media cache.

Depending on the nature of the content, Cloudfront is not usable for video, particularly the kind where people seek around a bunch, like instructional videos and tutorials. Also, people with slow connections expect the video to buffer while paused. This doesn't happen if you serve the videos from cloudfront.

v13inc2• 13 years ago

Why would Cloudfront cause the player to stop buffering the video? Does it happen with a HTTP Download distribution, or the RTMP streaming distribution? I've used both CloudFront and Akamai for serving video, and I don't remember running into those issues. I have only tested it with normal HTTP Download distributions, however.

modemuser• 13 years ago

> HTTP 1.0

If that is the only problem, flipping one bit in every response seems like a really simple solution. Why hasn't Cloudfront fixed it yet, do they know about this?

jefe782• 13 years ago

You're doing something horribly wrong. I work for a live streaming company and we make extensive use of Varnish. It can probably solve the problem you're describing.

photorized5• 13 years ago

If you haven't found a good alternative yet, we'll be happy to help.

/co-founder at Advection.NET

currysausage2• 13 years ago

I don't know about Cloudfront vs Rackspace+Akamai, however, based on some quick tests I did a year ago, I seem to recall that Rackspace+Akamai didn't deliver the same performance as professional Akamai services. In my experiments, Rackspace+Akamai used different servers, often located farther away, than big Akamai sites. (If anybody has background information about this, I would be very interested to hear.)

noelwelsh• 13 years ago

Rackspace CDN says this:

"Rackspace uses 213 of Akamai's edge locations, selected especially for our customers' typical usage patterns, and designed to cover all major areas of the globe." http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/

Akamai has approximately 5 gazillion edge locations, so yes, it is a cut down version. It is still a lot more POPs than just about every other CDN, though this doesn't necessarily translate into performance.

molecule2• 13 years ago

obvious: Amazon product isn't that great @ a service that's optimally provided by another Amazon product.

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

jdorfman6• 13 years ago

@molecule obvious to you and I. I wrote this to inform those who think it is a good idea to use S3 as a CDN, that it isn't. If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.

fintler• 13 years ago

So why is the title of your post "CDN vs S3"? Shouldn't it be something like "Don't use S3 as a CDN"?

To be honest, your post feels like spam for MaxCDN.

zwily2• 13 years ago

Honest question: Do you actually know anyone that thinks S3 is appropriate as a CDN?

molecule2• 13 years ago

> If we can educate a few developers then we (this awesome community of hackers) are making the web faster.

You're not making the web faster, you're shilling for your employer by comparing their apples to a competitor's oranges and proclaiming "our competitor's oranges make bad apple sauce!"

Failure to mention CloudFront is disingenuous.

iambibhas• 13 years ago

Who said s3 is a CDN at the first place!?

obviouslygreen2• 13 years ago

Certainly not Amazon, or they wouldn't have provided a service that acts as a CDN based on an S3 bucket.

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

I was using S3 to deliver secure signed downloads to customers. It worked well enough for a long time but eventually customers started having major connectivity issues and dead slow downloads.

I switched to CliudFront and, of course, downloads improved dramatically. I had to go with CF because we needed signed downloads. Would be nice to have alternatives but I'm happy with CF.

alinajaf4• 13 years ago

> I think S3 is a great origin server for static assets

Pro-tip: If you're using Rails, just create a distribution with your app as the origin server and in production.rb, set your asset host to your distributions host. You get the asset cache without having to do the precompile step. Tastes great with Heroku.

amalag• 13 years ago

This is smart, I usually use the precompile with upload to S3 via asset_sync gem. Since Heroku will precompile by default, what do you do to disable it. Just turning on config.serve_static_assets = true is likely not enough.

alinajaf4• 13 years ago

> This is smart, I usually use the precompile with upload to S3 via asset_sync gem

I used to do the same until cloudfront rolled out custom origins.

> Since Heroku will precompile by default, what do you do to disable it.

I misspoke in my comment, what I meant was you can skip the synch with S3 step. I've never actually bothered to stop heroku precompiling assets (though I may as well). This question on SO looks promising:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8953360/preventing-heroku...

If you do that though, as you mentioned, you will definitely need to flip serve_static_assets on.

Icer5k2• 13 years ago

True, S3 is not a CDN, but for a lot of use cases, serving directly from S3 is fine.

Taking Vine for example, I picked a random vine from twitter (https://vine.co/v/bE3YI365gxd) and a popular vine from twitter (https://vine.co/v/bEFFxdwjK9x). The popular video and thumbnails are served from a CDN, where the new one with no traffic is served directly from S3.

YouTube did the same thing in it's early days. CDNs are not required for all traffic, and blindly recommending them is a bad prescient. They're really great for content that is frequently accessed, but their value greatly decreases on long-tail content.

obviouslygreen2• 13 years ago

When S3 first came out, people used it for this without considering its latency issues, and it was a disaster. S3 is not a CDN and shouldn't be used as one; this is the reason for CloudFront.

While I can't compare CloudFront to other CDN's, I do know it works well for my clients that have been using it (and certainly better than serving directly from S3).

jefe782• 13 years ago

As the sysadmin to a company that does use both S3 and Cloudfront, I'm a little shocked anyone would think to use S3 for distribution. A little testing will reveal just how slow S3 can be.

jere3• 13 years ago

For everyone saying this is obvious: I'm one of those idiots that didn't quite get it and I appreciate this post a lot.

For the past week, I've been working on writing a little static site generator and putting it on S3 and I thought I was pretty damn clever for finally getting around to doing that... except now it turns out I'm clueless yet again. I'm looking at Cloudfront now, but I'm still not sure if has all the features that I was expected out of S3 alone (someone already mentioned Route 53 integration).

jimktrains2• 13 years ago

I wrote a static site generator at the beginning of this year:)

https://github.com/jimktrains/gus

jdorfman6• 13 years ago

@jimktrains2 +1

jcastro2• 13 years ago

Check out cloudpress: https://github.com/cloudpress/cloudpress

jedberg• 13 years ago

Back Fastly with your S3 static site. Works really well.

tzury2• 13 years ago

You should simply put CloudFront in front of S3.

In that case, you get the benefit of both worlds.

aritraghosh007• 13 years ago

You should really be using CloudFront and "NOT" S3 if you are looking for a CDN solution. There is a reason why CloudFront exists after all. S3 is a merely a drop-in storage option, consider it as a big file system residing within big fat piped data centers.

alinajaf4• 13 years ago

I don't think you're an idiot, it's more likely that you were just unaware of cloudfront or perhaps CDNs in general.

S3 is for storing files, Cloudfront is for serving cached versions of them really quickly out of edge locations (i.e. the closest CDN datacentre to the user that requests it).

In your usecase, your best bet is to use them in combination. Set up a Cloudfront distribution to point to your S3 bucket, then setup DNS to point to your Cloudfront distribution.

One big point to note is that you need to either:

* Configure Cloudfront to expire objects after a TTL (time-to-live) that is reasonable to you (e.g. 1 hour, 1 day etc). You can do this from the Cloudfront 'new distribution' wizard.

* Let Cloudfront respect HTTP headers and then make S3 (or whatever your custom origin is) set cache-control headers that make sense for how often you update your site. Not sure if/how you can do this with S3, with a custom origin its your app so you can set whatever http headers you like.

To be clear: if you don't do this, I'm pretty sure cloudfront caches things forever, or at least a very long time.

Personally, I think triggering cache invalidations should only be for emergencies (e.g. someone has uploaded questionable content to serve to other users and it's cached in at and edge). Rather than screwing around with that, save yourself some headaches: pick a sensible TTL and wait a little longer to have things up to date at your edges.

Note that by using Cloudfront in this manner, you get the performance benefit of serving static files. If performance at the expense of convenience was your main reason for going with static site generation, you might want to rethink that decision (there are other perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a static site generator, security being my favourite).

Do feel free to ping me over email if you have any questions on the above.

jere3• 13 years ago

>If performance at the expense of convenience was your main reason for going with static site generation, you might want to rethink that decision (there are other perfectly good reasons for wanting to use a static site generator, security being my favourite).

Great comment. I didn't get this part though. What would be a better alternative?

Performance is one of the main reasons I considered this (uptime is another). Let's just say I've had the same shared hosting for over 5 years and the speed/uptime have been a disappointment for a long time. When I was working on a site and noticed a 500kb background image was taking 2 seconds to load and around the same time I saw that the spotify homepage was streaming a fullscreen video instantly, that was kind of the last straw.

So I thought the idea was that skipping dynamic generation, using distribution (well, I think my assumption was S3 did have edge locations), and just having a better host was a big win.

bonzoesc• 13 years ago

You're not clueless. S3 is almost certainly good enough for what you're doing.

jere3• 13 years ago

I think I'm going to go with CloudFront, but I'm pretty upset about not being able to use a naked domain.

fs111• 13 years ago

What is next? A blogpost saying "Hammers are terrible screwdrivers. Don't use a hammer with a screw!"?

chj• 13 years ago

What do you think CloudFront is for?

hybrid11• 13 years ago

Just put Cloudflare in front of it, it's free :)

xur17• 13 years ago

This is what I ended up doing. I've been using Cloudfront for a while now, but Cloudflare is free, and people seem to indicate it is just as fast if not faster.

I have my static assets on a sub-domain, so I just set cloudflare to cache everything on that subdomain (and left it off on everything else).

CDN vs S3

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