CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
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Fastly Edge Cloud Platform
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Fastly, headquartered in San Francisco, offers the Fastly Edge Cloud Computing, Content Delivery Network (CDN) (formerly Fastly Deliver@Edge). Priced by bandwidth in gigabytes and number of file requests, Fastly supports image optimization, video and streaming, load balancing, and cloud security via web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection. Additionally, Fastly is available as a managed CDN.
Amazon CloudFront is best suited when there is a need of speed in serving static and dynanic web contents of a web application. If the content is already in that edge location, CloudFront delivers it immediately. If the content is not currently in that edge location, CloudFront retrieves it from an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server. Amazon CloudFront is not appropriate in case users can tolerate some delays or servers are present near to the location of user. It also Integrates through the W3 Total Cache plugin. Amazon CloudFront Pricing based on bandwidth usage that's the best part of it.
The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.
Lots of configuration options, which allow for different setups and pricing strategies
Lambda@Edge integration allows for really quite complex behaviours to be executed in the cloud at the edge node itself. This means there are a huge amount of possibilities for shaping and altering traffic close to the viewer.
Simple integration to other AWS services (e.g. S3)
Fastly Edge Cloud Platform is a powerful tool with robust capabilities, but it requires deep technical knowledge to integrate effectively into existing applications. While its performance and features are excellent, the lack of a user-friendly interface and the need for advanced configuration can make it challenging for teams without experienced developers.
CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.
Have used the IBM Cloud Content Delivery Network for a very short time span like a couple of weeks. Both the setup as well as interactions with other services are a little complicated or not straightforward when compared to AWS. Also, IBM cloud has less number of edge locations than AWS Cloudfront.
Fastly is a great choice for CDN vendor when performance and has the ability to quickly invalidate an asset from all POPs very quickly. It shines in use cases that require media delivery, like video. Fastly also provides a highly-optimized way to handle logical operations at the edge, meaning that, for example, quick authorization checks can be handled without having to work with the origin server.
While I was at Wanelo we were able to put Fastly in front of the growing web app, and selectively cache end points to improve stability and performance. In the meantime we rewrote the app completely in Ruby. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Fastly.
