Ask HN: Cloudflare CDN Alternatives?
Are there alternatives to cloudflare's CDN model that uses caching and ssl on DNS level?
Alternately, I'm not convinced that CDNs are not a scam.
Basically, it bends plausibility that a system with N+1 parts is really more reliable than a system with N parts. One more part is another part to fail and you can only come out ahead if you do everything right in the system design.
If you host your site in (say) us-east-1 and somebody wants to access your site via https from somewhere in Africa, it will work, but there will be some extra latency.
With pipelining you will be able to hide many of the round trips.
A CDN is going to have to copy the content to Africa before it can serve it to the viewer and if they haven't viewed it before the cache is only going to add to the time it takes to serve the content (first it has to determine it doesn't have the content, determine which parts of the Rube Goldberg machine are going to get it for you, get the content, serve the content.)
The CDN industry has convinced people that they "need" a CDN because "everyone else" uses a CDN. They never show full-system performance results, and if they did and they didn't like the answers they could always change a few parameters (didn't work well in Uganda? look, we got down from 20s in Nigeria to 19.2 s!) or blame you for doing something wrong on your site. (Pro tip: many web sites use 90% or more bandwidth for advertising, trackers, and other bloat... remove those and viewing your web site is like being hit by a bullet!)
along with the AWS offering
DNS and SSL (TLS) are very different things.