CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
ImageKit.io
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
ImageKit's real-time media processing APIs and Digital Asset Management platform help tech, marketing and creative teams to deliver, manage and collaborate on media assets at scale. It streamlines the media lifecycle on one platform for a seamless visual experience.
ImageKit offers:
- Real-time Media Processing: Delivers images and videos on websites and apps in real time with a unified URL-based API with 50+ transformations, intelligent format optimizations, and compression.…
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.
ImageKit is very well suited as a CDN for images. It can generate thumbnails on the fly, show metrics about usage and traffic, and can even serve highly compressed web images and tiny blurry placeholder images to speed up the initial load time. It also has a very good React component that allows for lazy-loading images that are below the fold.
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)
Automatically convert images for fast delivery based on browser support and network quality.
Well-documented integration documentation that is easy to follow when getting started with your implementation.
Easy to navigate user dashboard for setup and management of server origins and account settings. The usage analytics page is also handy to track and fix any 404 errors there might be for an image/s.
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.
The main consideration for our choice was to be able to optimize and deliver the images from the server they are stored on without needing to move or change the current product upload workflow for our Marketing team. This is where ImageKit.io provided the best solution at the time we evaluated the options available in the market.