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CDN experiment: Free CDN shockingly faster than Amazon CloudFront in many cases

echelon 5y ago
This looks like an ad for Jetpack CDN. The term "Jetpack" occurs 131 times in the article. I'd like to see an analysis of more CDNs before trusting something like this.
vasco 5y ago
What I've unfortunately found (or maybe we just had bad luck) is that going with smaller providers when choosing a CDN vendor, even if you get better performance, you'll be bitten by availability issues. When Cloudfront goes down, the internet goes down. Your downtime ceases to be your downtime, both from internal stakeholders as well as from customers, and it becomes "the internet's" downtime. At some point we considered multiple downstream providers and balancing between them in a geo distributed way. If a provider was slow or down in a geo, it'd automatically switch to PoPs from a different provider who would be faster at that time. Even this doesn't really do it though, if you like to manage your config and infra as code, you'll have to support different configurations across different providers, and having to always review and deploy multiple sets of changes that need to maintain parity. CDNs also have different behaviors in how they deal with stampedes and things like that, plus you need to manage multiple vendor relationships. I've come to the conclusion that I'd rather hitch my horse to the Cloudfront cart, ride their availability while paying up for the privilege and at some point, if the economics make sense and we have people with idle hands, start running our own CDN.
uncertainrhymes 5y ago
Clickbait. Cloudfront is not a 'premium CDN', its performance is notoriously mediocre. I'm pretty sure Cloudfront only compresses text, so no idea why they are comparing compressed images. Riddled with factual errors. This is not a good article.
tyingq 5y ago
Probably worth noting that while you can technically make the Jetpack CDN work like a normal CDN, the TOS has a very specific requirement. It requires the end site to be a wordpress site with the Jetpack software, or a wordpress.com hosted site.

This looks like an ad for Jetpack CDN. The term "Jetpack" occurs 131 times in the article. I'd like to see an analysis of more CDNs before trusting something like this.

vasco 5y ago

What I've unfortunately found (or maybe we just had bad luck) is that going with smaller providers when choosing a CDN vendor, even if you get better performance, you'll be bitten by availability issues. When Cloudfront goes down, the internet goes down. Your downtime ceases to be your downtime, both from internal stakeholders as well as from customers, and it becomes "the internet's" downtime. At some point we considered multiple downstream providers and balancing between them in a geo distributed way. If a provider was slow or down in a geo, it'd automatically switch to PoPs from a different provider who would be faster at that time. Even this doesn't really do it though, if you like to manage your config and infra as code, you'll have to support different configurations across different providers, and having to always review and deploy multiple sets of changes that need to maintain parity. CDNs also have different behaviors in how they deal with stampedes and things like that, plus you need to manage multiple vendor relationships. I've come to the conclusion that I'd rather hitch my horse to the Cloudfront cart, ride their availability while paying up for the privilege and at some point, if the economics make sense and we have people with idle hands, start running our own CDN.

uncertainrhymes 5y ago

Clickbait. Cloudfront is not a 'premium CDN', its performance is notoriously mediocre. I'm pretty sure Cloudfront only compresses text, so no idea why they are comparing compressed images. Riddled with factual errors. This is not a good article.

tyingq 5y ago

Probably worth noting that while you can technically make the Jetpack CDN work like a normal CDN, the TOS has a very specific requirement. It requires the end site to be a wordpress site with the Jetpack software, or a wordpress.com hosted site.