When they front the origin there's definitely an advantage, I agree. But that implies: You allow a CDN to host your initial asset, possibly a security risk Y

When they front the origin there's definitely an advantage, I agree. But that implies: You allow a CDN to host your initial asset, possibly a security risk You only use that one CDN for most/all non-dynamic content. When latency becomes that important I would rather host my own AS. Giving CDN the origin and your first content load is effectively handing off your entire site security to a third party. At that scale you could easily and cheaply run multi-homing on your own AS in maybe 10 colos across the world. Maybe 100k a year to eliminate third party risk. Maybe worth it? I think so