
Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs - forcer
http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/2016/04/18/google-cdn-beta-is-here-and-it-brings-more-than-meets-the-eye/
======
chrisbolt
> Cloud CDN is Google’s own CDN solution for sites running in VMs inside
> Compute Engine. It is designed and implemented a bit differently from other
> CDNs, since it is meant to cache not only static content, but practically a
> whole site in more than 50 edge caches globally.

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?

~~~
boulos
That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own
landing page ([https://cloud.google.com/cdn/](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/))
actually makes this clear: there are caches at the edge, but we (currently)
deeply understand your origin (our compute engine VMs) and don't require any
funny modification to your setup (just click a button) or look any different
than your existing anycast IP for L7 Load Balancing.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not this (so I only sort of know what
I'm talking about).

~~~
nikolay
"We deeply understand" \- the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want
full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is
not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things
(wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute
purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another
CloudFront!

~~~
pbarnes_1
The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV...

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.

~~~
nikolay
What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a
marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not
"niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the
worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN
comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat
(well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once
again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been
playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS
is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure
Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.

~~~
obulpathi
Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by
miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is
the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before
commenting on features.

~~~
mgnacl
Edit: retracted, after a closer look at your previous comments.

~~~
boulos
Aww, he's just excited! He really does work for Monsanto, not Google and if
you go back far enough you'll see he's used AWS, GCP, and Open Stack (and
seems to enjoy meditation). So he's not some sort of shill, just a happy
customer!

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

~~~
nikolay
I'm not sure if it's related to his work at Monsanto and the exposure to GMOs
and herbicides, but based on his info, he is an obvious case of illeism [0].
I'm joking, of course. :)

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illeism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illeism)

------
Ensorceled
"it's already one of the fastest" ... wouldn't we expect a _new_ service, with
lots of empty cache tables and available free ram, to be faster than the
established players?

~~~
dalore
Empty cache tables means lower hits so slower.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
I think the parent meant the cache tables of each node are empty (not many
users yet), so the tested apps will be able to have relatively large cache
tables on those nodes, since they aren't getting LRU'd out by other users.

So the cache table for a tested app is fuller because the cache table overall
is emptier.

------
lolobkk
Google CDN looks very similar to what Cloudflare Free Plan offers. A no-
Frills, fully automated setup with little or no control on how your content is
being delivered. Main difference with Cloudflare being that Google forces you
to use GCP as Origin and you have to pay for the CDN service (Bandwidth,
purge, requests...) which Cloudflare offers for free and you can use any
Origin server.

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

~~~
mgw
I don't know if Google does this, but because they control both endpoints
(cache server and load balancer) of the longest section of the path they could
accelerate it by replace HTTP(S) there with something like CloudFlare's
Railgun. [1]

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.

[1] [https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun/](https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun/)

------
tomsmeding
Seems ironic that the linked site doesn't load (at least for me)

~~~
boulos
Nothing beats an uncached WordPress blog ;).

~~~
yeukhon
Even if cached, most self-hosted WP can't handle HN visitor volume :-)

~~~
girvo
It can if you dump it as static HTML and serve that instead ;)

------
sp332
I can make a fast CDN too, if it doesn't have any users yet!

~~~
rmdoss
I was going to say that :) When you are starting and have very few users, you
should be fast.

It is very hard to keep it very fast when you have millions of free users,
like CloudFlare does. That is impressive.

~~~
wstrange
I'd assume Google knows a thing or two about scaling content

~~~
jethro_tell
I don't doubt that and I'm excited to see some benchmarks once the service is
in full operation mode. But until then, this makes it sounds like they
magically beat out everyone else when the fact of the matter is that there is
no load to measure.

------
ddorian43
Question: How do cdns serve/shard data ? Meaning, in a pop, there are say 100
nodes, and all of them cache some data, say by hashing the path /ayb.jpg.

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).

~~~
cortesoft
Probably each CDN does it differently... but the one I know about does the
second.... so it goes LB, first webserver on random node, and that first
webserver knows where to grab the content from the second webserver on the
proper node that has the content.

~~~
tsmith84
Most CDN have a pile of patents that show how they do their cache hierarchy.

-Ex CDN worker

------
jwineman
Why don't you compare Google's CDN to CloudFlare?

~~~
boulos
I'm not the OP, but I'm not sure why they included MaxCDN and Fastly but not
(at least) CloudFlare's free service.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (though I had nothing to do with this
service).

~~~
forcer
OP here: You are right, CloudFlare would have been nice and in retrospect we
should have added it. I think it would have fared quite nicely as during all
the tests we do on regular basis its doing really well.

~~~
latchkey
Irony = their site is on CF.

    
    
      $ whois speedchecker.xyz
      Domain Name: SPEEDCHECKER.XYZ
      Name Server: LEE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
      Name Server: PAM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM

~~~
mstrem
I think the OP just added CloudFlare when the site was overloaded earlier...

~~~
forcer
yes. That is true. We did not expected the post will get that popular.
Unfortunately, it was all done too late. What helped us the most was that blog
is hosted on DigitalOcean VPS. We scaled up to the most powerful instance and
instantly the blog was back. Kudos to DigitalOcean, it saved our bacon big
time today :)

------
Animats
Of course, if it's in beta, and the infrastructure has been built out but not
yet heavily loaded, the performance may be unusually good.

(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.)

------
rmdoss
Would love to see CloudFlare added to the mix. In fact, I would love to see
Incapsula, Sucuri and KeyCDN compared as well, to get all top players
compared.

I guess I might be asking too much :)

~~~
forcer
OP Here> yes, omission on our part. CloudFlare is very popular and even more
so on HackerNews. We should have added it. There are simply too many CDNs to
put into one post/chart and still make the article interesting. You can sign
up to our blog to get more information which does not necessarily becomes
trending on HN or elsewhere.

------
Pirate-of-SV
Would be cool if you could add an image of the table with average measured
times by country for the selection of european countries. (Marked with double
asterisk in the post)

I guess the difference between these countries could be noticeable.

Alternatively you could post it here. I'm mainly interested in the Swedish
numbers.

------
kevinSuttle
I wonder if they're using Brotli. [http://9to5google.com/2016/01/20/chrome-
brotli-compression-l...](http://9to5google.com/2016/01/20/chrome-brotli-
compression-launch/)

------
pbarnes_1
If anyone wants to poke this, I've set up 2 micro instances in each GCP zone
and put the GCDN in front here:

[http://httpbin-gcdn.xyz/](http://httpbin-gcdn.xyz/)

It's quite smart and pushes traffic to the right zone:

[https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca...](https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca3/)

Very cool stuff.

------
sams99
Something that is unclear to me here, can I origin pull from anywhere? or is
this purely for compute engine now?

Regarding free SSL are we talking SNI here or is this free non SNI HTTPS
hosting?

~~~
boulos
Right now it's just compute engine (Source: cloud.google.com/cdn). I'm not
sure on the SNI part, but like you I assume that's the case.

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."

~~~
mvitorino
That's right, since it is based on the global load balancing tech, you get a
single IP for all edge locations which means you can use your own custom SSL
(without the need for SNI) at no extra cost (which would cost you $500/month
on AWS CloudFront).

------
imaginenore
Mirror: [http://archive.is/HVpTz](http://archive.is/HVpTz)

------
lukasm
Don't use it if you have customers in China. They won't be able to access it.

~~~
PunchTornado
are you sure? everyone has customers in China.

~~~
philliphaydon
I'm not sure you understand his comment.

~~~
PunchTornado
then explain it. what point is in a cdn that will do nothing for your chinese
customers? or it will still work but be slower?

~~~
pbarnes_1
What s/he's saying is that because GCP runs on a Google network, it's blocked
by the GFWoC.

------
FussyZeus
Anyone want to start a pool on how long until Google shuts it down when it
doesn't end up as #1 in the market?

~~~
tacos
You can't have a convincing cloud story without CDN. I'm an Azure guy but
Google's investment here is clear. I'll take that bet.

~~~
bigiain
Sure it makes business sense for Google to do this, but you've gotta admit to
having that same reservation for every new Google service.

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...")

~~~
eknkc
I felt like this about Google services for a long time now. However, we
decided to go with GCE for some of our recent / less critical work and to be
honest, I've been really happy.

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.

~~~
boulos
Based on your slack channel comment, I assume you're using Kubernetes. That's
a great choice for new development, and I'm glad you've had your questions
answered! I can't tell though, did you also use one of our paid support tiers?
([https://cloud.google.com/support](https://cloud.google.com/support)).

------
oldgun
Good. Now when will Google shut down this service?

~~~
throwaway_1010
Never. As always. DVMB.

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.

