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.
Depending on a site's structure, and a team's business flow, Moovweb could be a great fit for a business looking to optimize its desktop site for mobile and tablet devices. Given that more and more businesses are designing for "Mobile First" or at least making pages tap-friendly for tablet devices, there are cases where some businesses will find responsive or simplified designs as a good enough solution. However, for a large portion of sites, a unique experience is needed for mobile and a different experience is needed for tablet. Customer moments are different, and a single site that simply "fits" onto a smaller screen really doesn't address the change in the customer moment. Moovweb is able to transform the desktop site into optimized sites that streamline the experience into what is most impactful to the customer in that moment, based on business logic and with minimal support. After considering a responsive site, the Moovweb solution was the right choice for our business and for our customers, and the results are proving we made the right choice.
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)
Moovweb takes the time to really understand your needs and challenges and is willing to work with and address them. They are partners during and AFTER implementation.
Moovweb and their implementation partner 64Labs has a fantastic response time and work ethic. They really will do what it takes.
Moovweb takes the time to share their product road map with customers.
Depending on how your site is built and maintained, there may be a different solution that will be a better option for your business and customer needs.
At the end of the day, this is another layer that is added to your development plan and time to ensure updates work across multiple devices. Moovweb is really good about the turn-time for these updates, but there still needs to be the added QA step for M&T optimization per release.
Personally as a Mobile Architect I am a huge proponent of building mobile-first responsive websites. I will always fight for a lobby for businesses to build sites with all devices in mind and not focus their attention on desktop driven sites which are then adaptively scaled to meet the demands of the business, in my opinion leading to a never ending cycle of building separate media queries to compensate for every device the business chooses to market to
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.
Good set of customer success people combined with the flexibility to use high-quality onshore partners if workload increases at busy times. I think Moovweb's support efforts are pretty solid.
Don't spend weeks in design. Because of the way the technology works nuances of design can change very quickly further down the line. We have changed the look of the product list for a client a week before launch.
Push for getting the project into UAT within four weeks of the kickoff of the project. There are few retailer projects that need to take more than that. In my experience the more concentrated the timeline the more effective the implementation.
Check that there are no major changes planned on desktop during the time of your implementation (another reason to keep the development to four weeks).
If you have custom mobile content requirements, get them to your implementer at the start. Moovweb is great at heavy-lifting existing content, but your implementer will need to recommend solutions for custom content that will need to be tested. Get these requirements out at the start.
Make a list of your desktop plugins. Moovweb can handle them all, but they can be handled in different ways
If you have Paypal/Google Wallet and want it on mobile as part of your project, talk about that early on.
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.
This is the only mobile technology we have used. We went through an extensive research and vetting process. In the end Moovweb was the best choice for technology and business needs. We considered the following companies: Moovweb,Mobify, Usablenet, Mad Mobile, SKAVA, Wompmobile. Forrester has a mobile infrastrucutre services report that could be very helpful.
The implementation was 4 months from start to finish. Mobile is about 10% of our visits today and our mobile revenue for the first half is about $200K so we will have a payback in 1 -2 years.
Moovweb is not the most economical solution out there. It is one of the most comprehensive for sites needing all their content available for mobile.
