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> 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

> 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?

boulos 11y ago
That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own landing page (https://cloud.google.com/cdn/ 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_1 11y 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=2016-04-17 http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=dsa&country=US&date=...
- nikolay 11y 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!
  - pbarnes_1 11y ago
    The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV... They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.
    - nikolay 11y ago
      What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.
      - obulpathi 11y ago
        Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.
        nikolay 11y ago
        I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon! Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
- forcer 11y 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_1 11y 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.
- ddorian43 11y ago
  Cloudflare has interconnect with google: https://www.cloudflare.com/google/ https://www.cloudflare.com/google/
  - pbarnes_1 11y ago
    You would need someone with access to CloudFlare POPs to run a traceroute from say, their Sydney POP to a GCE us-central instance to be able to tell whether this is really of much value apart from reducing costs at specific IX/peering points (which is actually of significant value, but I don't think this improves performance as much as you would expect -- the Interconnect is for reducing bandwidth costs for Google).

boulos 11y ago

That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own landing page (https://cloud.google.com/cdn/ 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_1 11y 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=2016-04-17 http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=dsa&country=US&date=...
nikolay 11y 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!
- pbarnes_1 11y ago
  The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV... They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.
    - obulpathi 11y ago
      Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.
      - nikolay 11y ago
        I'd chose Azure before Google Cloud if I look for AWS alternative. I see more fruitful imagination in Microsoft than in Google! I am highly disappointed by Google - they've missed so many opportunities when it comes to Cloud Computing! They started the negative trend with the ridiculous and pricey AppEngine! And now they continue to lag severely behind Amazon! Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
forcer 11y 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_1 11y 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.

ddorian43 11y ago
Cloudflare has interconnect with google: https://www.cloudflare.com/google/ https://www.cloudflare.com/google/
- pbarnes_1 11y ago
  You would need someone with access to CloudFlare POPs to run a traceroute from say, their Sydney POP to a GCE us-central instance to be able to tell whether this is really of much value apart from reducing costs at specific IX/peering points (which is actually of significant value, but I don't think this improves performance as much as you would expect -- the Interconnect is for reducing bandwidth costs for Google).