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 simpl

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.