Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Boston, offers Akamai Connected Cloud, a content delivery network (CDN) with a variety of services used to guarantee application, API, and media delivery.
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Azure CDN
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Microsoft offers a content delivery network, Azure CDN.
Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.
Azure CDN has at hand an infinity of applications and tools to implement in your system and have better control of your data in a clean and secure platform on the web, we recommend this program since the percentage of solutions provided by this program is very high and find a way to make each user's job easier.
Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .
For the longest time they didn't have a robust SDK. They have one now, but it could be better.
The different flavors of Azure CDN (Akamai, Verizon, etc) have different costs, but not well differentiated features. Might be confusing to new users.
I'm not overly familiar with it, but AWS does have a programmability in their CDN offering (Lambda @ Edge) and Azure doesn't seem to have an equivalent (Azure Functions is region-specific).
Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.
Great support from the team whenever we're stuck. Very proactive in resolving issues and also making changes as per the requirements of the organization.
Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.
We did not evaluate any other CDN's before we selected Azure. We heavily use Azure for our development and infrastructure efforts so choosing the Azure CDN was easy. The only thing we compared it to was standing up a Windows Server VM and pointing a CDN URL to it allowing it to serve as a file server, which was much more cumbersome.
Azure CDN reduced origin instance load by removing the need to constantly serve large numbers of static files, meaning applications can be deployed with smaller/fewer instances.
Azure CDN reduces apparent load times to customers by serving cached files out of POPs in the local region of those clients, instead of requiring those clients to make multiple, lengthy requests through to the origin servers.
