Amazon CloudFront vs. Azure Front Door

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
Azure Front Door
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Azure Front Door is a cloud content delivery network (CDN) service that helps users deliver high performance, scalability, and a secure user experiences for content and applications. It includes a customizable rules engine for advanced routing capabilities. It boasts instant scalability with global HTTP load balancing and failover.
$35
per month
Pricing
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Editions & Modules
Over 5PB
$0.02
Next 524TB
$0.03
Next 4PB
$0.03
Next 350TB
$0.04
Next 100TB
$0.06
Next 40TB
$0.08
First 10TB
$0.09
Standard
$35
per month
Premium
$330
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsBase fees (Billed hourly and only for number of hours used)​
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Azure CDN
Azure CDN
Score 7.1 out of 10
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudFrontAzure Front Door
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.
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Pros
  • Solid CDN services, does what it says on the tin
  • 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)
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  • Content delivery across all continents
  • Web & media acceleration
  • Web application firewall
  • Backend geo-availability
  • Reporting & access metrics
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Cons
  • If price is the main concern, CloudFront is not the cheapest-in-class by a wide margin
  • Some of the settings are not obvious to new users, and the management dashboards could use work
  • Lacks fine-grained access controls and statistical reports for usage
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  • Better control over origin caching
  • Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management
  • TLS & Cipher Control
  • Faster publishing or change updates
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Usability
Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.
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Return on Investment
  • RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
  • It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.
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  • AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
  • It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
  • Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
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