

Rackspace Cloud switching CDN from Limelight to Akamai - jread
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/blog/2011/01/12/big-news-for-cloud-files-users-akamai-is-coming/

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sounddust
Is anyone else having the same issue with these services as I am - namely that
Rackspace Cloud (and Amazon Cloudfront) do not support gzip compression? That
means that any advantage in latency that you gain from serving a file locally
is offset by the fact that it must be served uncompressed. It seems like it
should be an absolute requirement for any CDN provider (and the smaller ones
like SimpleCDN and MaxCDN do support gzip). I've repeatedly asked Rackspace if
they plan to support gzip and they haven't given any indication that it's
coming; this e-mail confirms it's not even on their roadmap.

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seiji
The CDN should pass through whatever you give it. If your servers return gzip
content for a request, the CDN will cache it.

It sounds like you want a configurable distributed web server instead of a CDN
proxy cache.

~~~
sounddust
That's exactly how MaxCDN and SimpleCDN work, but Cloudfront and Rackspace
Cloud don't pass through requests from your own server; rather, they require
you to manually upload the files you want to serve via CDN in advance.

~~~
asb
But Cloudfront now supports custom origins which I believe allows gzip by
forwarding the Accept-Encoding header and caching different versions of the
file depending on the value of that header.

~~~
sounddust
This is great to know, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary work on our part
to make it work. That means for each file we have to manually create and
upload a compressed version, ensure that the compressed and uncompressed
versions are always in sync, and properly set up custom origins for the files.

Instead, Amazon's front end should just check the incoming accept-encoding
header and automatically compress as needed.

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byoung2
This has been a big issue in the Rackspace Cloud user community. There has
been no support for CNAME, SSL, or invalidation, so lots of customers
(including me) have looked to other providers. I moved all of my projects to
Amazon Cloudfront for this reason. Hopefully with the move to Akamai,
Rackspace can play some serious catch-up feature-wise.

~~~
ambirex
I agree, this had was showstopper for a previous project. We had briefly
looked into a stop gap solution of a SSL proxy but that really negated the CDN
features. I'm glad we choose to go with Amazon, because they have continued
their lead in the cloud services space.

I am very glad to see Rackspace (and others) continue to expand their offering
into this market.

~~~
chopsueyar
Are you guys only delivering VOD content? Any live streaming?

~~~
byoung2
Not on any public projects, but I have been experimenting with Cloudfront RMTP
streaming. I'm interested to see if there are any big projects using this.

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prakash
If you are interested in CDN performance comparison as seen by end-users take
a look at our Charts:
[http://cedexis.com/data/charts.html?country=223&provider...](http://cedexis.com/data/charts.html?country=223&providerType=3&chartType=all)

Gabriel (yegg) wrote about our services on his blog --
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/testing-cdn-
perf...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/testing-cdn-performance-
via-cedexis-radar.html)

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wildmXranat
We've got 500K objects on Amazon and any one of them needed to be accessible
via SSL. That and the price made Amazon an easy choice from a myriad of
competitors.

