Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs
blog.speedchecker.xyz
blog.speedchecker.xyz
I'm not seeing what's so special here. Other CDNs can do whole-site acceleration and caching (Akamai Sureroute, EdgeCast ADN).
> It is a whole new take in the concept of CDNs, going way further than simply caching files, since it is directly integrated into their Load Balancing system and it literally means that a copy of your site will be running and serving from the closest location to your customers, with a single public IP address thanks to Anycast.
This makes it sound like Google is magically making your GCE instances run in each of their POPs. What if those instances need to share state? What happens when a page does 10 SQL queries to a server halfway around the world?
Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not this (so I only sort of know what I'm talking about).
Edit: Any chance you could ask Cedexis to add GCDN to these reports: http://www.cedexis.com/reports/#?report=dsa&country=US&date=...
They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.
Also, if people mostly cared about "the fastest", you'd see only Akamai in the past, but, no, people wanted freedom! I was stuck with Akamai and their $600/hr professional services for too long to know this first-hand! And "the fastest" is when the service is not heavily utilized like the rest and it has very limited functionality. Plus, other vendors constantly improve as well. The fastest service today is not the fastest of the tomorrow, but the one that starts with a minuscule subset of the baseline and what the others is doomed!
I think Microsoft is looking to capture their F500 base that are highly Windows/AD-centric.
Am I missing something?
Note that for YC, the number is $500k.
With Lambda, API Gateway, WAF, and ECS, DynamoDB or RDS, you pretty much can cover 95% of the usage scenarios.
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
Any reference for this claim?
Having used both AWS and GCE, and I vastly prefer GCE. It is simply easier to use and offers better price/performance.
"In certain scenarios, such as when flash traffic is expected, or in the case where a load test cannot be configured to gradually increase traffic, we recommend that you contact us to have your load balancer "pre-warmed". We will then configure the load balancer to have the appropriate level of capacity based on the traffic that you expect. We will need to know the start and end dates of your tests or expected flash traffic, the expected request rate per second and the total size of the typical request/response that you will be testing."
Edit: This means ELB could not deal with sudden spikes of traffic.
As to load balancing, I assume the poster is referring to the need to "pre-warm" ELB if you actually want to scale while our Maglev based load balancing goes from 0 to 1M qps within a minute.
Finally, EBS with provisioned IOPS is a good product! But so is PD-SSD, and you don't need to be a storage expert to get the best performance.
As others have pointed out, we've made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. Give us a closer look!
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.
[0]: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.1/reference/vcl.html
Council Bluffs, IA (us-central1) Berkeley County, SC (us-east1) St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1) Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
So on any cache miss at one of the 50+ edge POPs, the cloud HTTP(S) load balancer will direct the request to the nearest cloud region. The resulting cache fill happens over Google's global network, which is fast. Once that cache fill happens, that edge cache can serve the content directly to clients, which is even faster.
I think the author of this blog post is trying to simplify the explanation (or just doesn't understand). No 'copy' of your site is running on the closest location. GCE is not available in all POPs.
These results would look very different if EC ADN was included. And not including CloudFlare is a bit strange.
Both EC and CF run Anycast CDNs. This is still a really cool thing for Google to release because it's nice to have more competition in the space.
I've run some prelim tests on pure route latency from 90+ worldwide locations and GC-CDN (? :) is pretty evenly matched with CF/EC.
The real test would be end to end HTTP request latency and this is where GC-CDN would probably beat out CF (since you're on the Google net from POP to GCE DC, which is nice and fast, whereas CF talks to your origin over the public Internet). EC ADN is symmetric (POP to POP is on-net) so probably more comparable.
So the cache table for a tested app is fuller because the cache table overall is emptier.
Not sure why someone would use Google CDN when you can get the same for free with Cloudflare. Moreover, Cloudflare provides Security up to L7 with WAF whereas Google Cloud has no Security features. Anybody know how DDoS (L3/4) mitigation works on Google CDN?
Now if you want control and the ability to set up your own policies (Cache Control Headers, redirect, complex cache key manipulation, etc...), Google Cloud is not going to be what you need, at least for the time being and you would be better of with EdgeCast or Akamai. Faslty is an interesting option too but their network is very small compare to EdgeCast or Akamai. Fastly is about 1Tbps of capacity whereas Akamai or EdgeCast are > 20Tbps.
PS: Akamai is not IP Anycast based
Since Railgun is only available at CloudFlare plans starting at $200/month, this could make the Google offering attractive for certain customers.
In any case, it is hard to beat free for most sites with moderate needs.
No mention of if their DNS is anycasted, one would presume so.
[1] https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/04/serving-at-the-edge-good-fo...
It is very hard to keep it very fast when you have millions of free users, like CloudFlare does. That is impressive.
Does the loadbalancer (say, haproxy) know which node should-have the file cached ? Or there is random loadbalancing and each node get's the data from the other nodes (using the same hash)? Just like openstack-swift (there are proxy that serve http-requests, and data nodes that have files).
-Ex CDN worker
Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (though I had nothing to do with this service).
$ whois speedchecker.xyz
Domain Name: SPEEDCHECKER.XYZ
Name Server: LEE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: PAM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM(We see this every time the cellular industry rolls out a new band nobody is using yet, and the review sites talk about how great the bandwidth is.)
I guess I might be asking too much :)
I guess the difference between these countries could be noticeable.
Alternatively you could post it here. I'm mainly interested in the Swedish numbers.
It's quite smart and pushes traffic to the right zone:
https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca...
Very cool stuff.
Regarding free SSL are we talking SNI here or is this free non SNI HTTPS hosting?
Edit: Nope! A little birdie pointed out to me that since "each HTTP(S) LB gets its own Anycast VIP, so there's no need for SNI."
Would you build a business model that relies on a brand new Google service?
Hell no - give it a few years, and wait to see if the "customer support" consists of hundreds of other suckers who've gone all-in complaining to each other on the public forums, with not even the original 20% time Gooogler bothering to read or respond to anything...
It's just happened too often. (And I know Nest and Revolv aren't "Google" as such, but they're definitely run by "Googlers" and are under the same adult supervision, so it's not even like you can say "sure, they _used_ to be like that...")
Would I put containers on Google Cloud in return for free upload bandwidth to YouTube and use their CDN because it was easy? You bet your ass I would. If you can't tell the difference between a novelty thermostat and a major, long-term, strategic corporate investment then you've got bigger problems than switching DNS entries for a CDN.
We had decent support and even our requests through non official channels like slack communities or direct emails got responded / followed up. Services seem as stable as AWS. And most of the tooling is better.
I think they are doing a great work recently on Google Cloud. Granted, we built everything with "moving to AWS should be easy / possible in case Google fucks something up really bad" in mind, which proves your point. But locking in does not scare me more than it does about locking in to AWS at this stage.
This is not green field, but as the neighbor's lawn next to mine, it may or may not be greener. Time and fertilizer will tell. Smell the dirt Spartans.