How does Amazon CloudFront compare with Limelight or Akamai?

Question

Good morning,

I am looking into an inexpensive solution to deliver content to our European customers, I came across Amazon CloudFront. I was wondering if any of you had any experience using this service? If so, what are your thoughts compared to something like Limelight or Akamai?

Thanks!

Insensible

Answer 1

I have no real-world experience using CloudFront, but on paper it strikes me as a viable CDN for medium or small volumes, and possibly high variation of volume over time, compared to Akamai's and LimeLight's offerings which may be better for steadily high volumes.

CloudFront is essentially a "pay per use" arrangement, and pricing is pretty transparent. For example, if in a typical month you serve about a million GETs from Europe and a million GETs from the US, each GET delivering about a megabyte, the data transfer will cost you as follows: $1.00 for the US gets, $1.20 for the Europe gets, $170.00 for each of of the two data transfer volumes (1000 GB each), total $342.20. "No minimum, no cover", no fixed fees, just pay as you go: if next month your volumes double, so will your costs -- if they halve, so will your costs (lower per-GB tariffs only trigger at very high volumes).

In addition, you do have to pay S3 fees as well, since CloudFront edge servers get your data from S3; for the typical case, storage fees will be pennies (your 2000 GB served probably mean just a few GB stored, being served over and over), GET and transfer costs similar to the CloudFront pricing -- however, you typically won't be paying the S3 to edge transfer costs all that often, only when the "cache" kept at the edge nodes needs to be refreshed (so the extra cost depends essentially on the rate of "churn" of your contents).

A very complete article showing all that's needed to use S3 and CloudFront for a simple Ruby on Rails appliation is here -- don't be daunted if you don't do Ruby, it should be simple enough to follow anyway (hey, I don't do Ruby either, but I could follow along;-).

Praemunire

Answer 2

A content delivery network will be anything but "inexpensive". You will need a server in Europe with good connectivity all around. My take would be a UK VPS with 478east, but i'm biased, since i'm with them right now.

Silverlight is a technology, not a content delivery network. Akamai will run you out of house and home unless you're planning to deliver 10TB per month, and can jump into a one year contract.

You haven't mentioned if you will deliver static or streaming content, as that counts, since you might have a harder time using a VPS/server in Europe as you will need to setup a lot more stuff for streaming as opposed to static/progressive streaming.

Phelgon

Sorry, still working on my morning coffee... I was referring to LimeLight. Regarding streaming content, we do have a couple of videos but I would probably port those over to youtube anyways. About half of our customer base are europeans... – Insensible

CDN assumes global delivery, and Limelight is expensive as well, though quality-wise, slightly under Akamai. Cloudfront will work, but you'll start feeling those 17 cents per GB pile up. – Phelgon

Answer 3

If you're still in the market, you should look at Aryaka. Their architecture for delivering application seems quite different than traditional CDN. Aryaka's architecture allows for private middlemile transport without ISP peering and TCP op. I hope this helps.

Monongahela