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 performanc

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.