On paper the Rackspace one looks like a great performance/price alternative.
Depending on the nature of the content, Cloudfront is not usable for video, particularly the kind where people seek around a bunch, like instructional videos and tutorials. Also, people with slow connections expect the video to buffer while paused. This doesn't happen if you serve the videos from cloudfront.
To see this in action, play a video with chrome://media-internals/ open.
A video served from S3 will get saved to the media cache, and the full video can buffer when paused. A video served from cloudfront will only buffer a few seconds of video.
Update:
It is probably just easier to see for yourself:
Here is a video served from S3. Pause the video in chrome, and you will see the whole video gets buffered:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/jctest20080526/test/test.mp4
Here is the same video served from Cloudfront. Start the video, and pause it, and notice how it doesn't buffer more than a few seconds:
I'm not a big fan of Akamai's control panel -- setting up new distributions is way to complicated (albeit more flexible), and configuration changes were taking almost a day to propogate.
Amazon promised a fix, but then back tracked. Their explanation was something along the lines of "an old version of Squid has the same problem, thus it is okay". I cannot comprehend the logic system they employ to think that is a good reason to live with the bug.
Do you know of any workarounds client-side?
I don't think there is one. You can't even compile a custom Chromium because it doesn't have h264 codecs. I even spend a day reading the Chrome source code, hoping there was some combination of headers that could trick Chrome into using the media cache, but I didn't find anything. I probably should have just spent the day finding a better CDN.
If that is the only problem, flipping one bit in every response seems like a really simple solution. Why hasn't Cloudfront fixed it yet, do they know about this?
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=351384&#...
- - -
Hello,
While we are aware of the issue with range request HTTP/1.0 206 responses and Chrome, we cannot provide an ETA for a fix. Since this issue is specific to range requests, an immediate workaround is to disable range requests on your origin server if this is possible for your use case.
It is also worth mentioning that multiple web proxy and cache application vendors have using HTTP/1.0 as a de facto standard for many years, so you will probably sporadically get similar reports from your end users using Chrome, but not other browsers such as Firefox or Safari. For example, here is a discussion between a Chrome developer on the mailing list for the popular Squid web cache about a similar report: http://www.squid-cache.org/mail-archive/squid-dev/201204/011... I am not saying that always returning HTTP/1.0 will stick around forever, but it is fairly common in real world situations today.
Furthermore, your profile suggest you work for a pump and dump penny stock company (basically a scam). If your employer is paying you in something other than cash, you need to walk away asap.
There's lots of video CDN "solutions", and it's almost always cheapest (even after labor support) to DIY with bare metal at very large scale. If it were me, I would eval video CDN shops using tsung test cases wired up as nagios checks. Gotta make sure their stuff stays working.
A payment gateway once mistakenly deployed API changes to production without notice. Trust no one.
Anyone evaluated? http://live.bittorrent.com
If you simply need to deliver files or live streams, without needing to provide complex functionality at the edge (various kinds of protection, geo blocking, or pay-per-minute), and your traffic patterns are predictable - it's often cheaper to build your own solution. Once you start thinking about backbone and colo redundancy, deploy in different countries with contract commits - things get expensive very quickly.
The beauty of using a massive third party delivery service isn't performance, it's elasticity. Just like with the web apps (frequently hosted on DIY systems) that go down as soon as the link goes up on HN - being able to absorb traffic spikes without failing (and without forcing you to commit to a higher tier for a year) can be very valuable.
Setup enough identical boxes with each of Squid, Nginx, Varnish, trafficserver, etc. and evaluate each with basically the same traffic and however much tweaking.
Simple caching works for images, but doesn't work for large video files, for example (look at latest financials from public CDNs - they are all bleeding cash).
It's really not that simple as testing a box to see which setup works best.
/co-founder at Advection.NET
CDN that support Range Requests correctly. I want to use S3 as the origin. I need an edge location in Australia. Also, there can be no 301/302 HTTP redirects, thus I have eliminated Google as a potential offering. My current spend is around $1000 a month, so it is a tiny account.
malatortsev at advection dot net
"Rackspace uses 213 of Akamai's edge locations, selected especially for our customers' typical usage patterns, and designed to cover all major areas of the globe." http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/files/
Akamai has approximately 5 gazillion edge locations, so yes, it is a cut down version. It is still a lot more POPs than just about every other CDN, though this doesn't necessarily translate into performance.
"though this doesn't necessarily translate into performance" - Yes, even when the files were already cached, I wasn't always satisfied with the performance.
A detail that bugged me, by the way, was the high number of CNAME requests, although this should at worst affect the first view.