"They still have the best performing and most feature-ful CDN available."
I don't think thats true. Do you have an actual reference for this? I've used CLoudFlare heavily, along with Akamai, Fastly, Verizon, Bunny, etc.
I would say CloudFlare is the most approachable CDN with a wide set of easily accessible features. Its free tier is terrific too. I would argue that feature for feature, CDN's like Akamai have a much larger feature set, and are also far more complex to deploy.
There may be more CDNs but most of them aren't that great…
CloudFront has HTTP/2 prioritisation, and concatenation issues
Many of the others build on nginx which also has HTTP/2 prioritisation issues
Akamai, Cloudflare & Fastly seem to be the only CDNs that are seriously investing in their infrastructure and their platform — all use custom edge server software (yes some of it forked from open source), have built in image optimisation services, have ability to run workloads on the edge etc.
Then there's the peering arrangements that have to be negotiated (and paid for if you're not pushing significant traffic)
There are many noteworthy players - Akamai, Fastly etc., and Edge plaoviders like ourselves (Zycada) who complement top CDNs like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly.
Unless you are using Cloudflare's specialized security services, CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between. You can ever do dynamic DNS things to use multiple CDNs at the same time and shift different traffic segments onto different providers if you are into that sort of things, or tier one CDN behind another to act as a mid tier.
I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs because they will be very required if they ever get their way since by definition, if everyone is running small to medium, highly distributed sites, then you aren't likely to have a point of presence near most users and that will be poor user experience.
My guess is that most people have only heard of Akamai or Cloudflare so they automatically associate CDN with huge companies, but the reality is that the CDN space is highly competitive and decentralized. Just off the top of my head there's at least a dozen providers I would consider tier 1, several dozen I would classify as medium sized or targeted at niche audiences, and probably hundreds of small providers, not to mention just about every large telco operates their own CDN now.
CDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of.
There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.
The three major CDNs (Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly) all support code execution at the edge, and all have (or will have) storage at the edge too
There's also a real question of whether Vercel and Netlify are really at the edge when they’re mainly running in AWS, GCP etc data centers rather than deploying their own hardware at edge locations, ISPs etc.
Don't get me wrong I think Vercel and Netlify are interesting but they seem to talk about being ‘on the edge’ while they really aren’t ATM
Not sure why you think CDN implies geographically distributed edge hosting. Are you getting that from Cloudflare's marketing? A company that sells a geographically distributed network?
But at this point in time I think it'd be unfair to call Cloudflare "just a CDN" so not really equivalent.
From what I've heard through the technical operations jungle. Google has been pushing their CDN product hard for a long time, which isn't a shock since they've been trying to push GCP hard for a long time. But it's a little like AWS's Cloudfront CDN. It's very very rare to see someone using an AWS Cloudfront or GCP CDN... that isn't on said cloud platform already.
I spent a decent part of last year testing various CDNs and this is not what I found. Cloudflare, Verizon were both better (performance, cache retention) than Akamai based on my testing. And cheaper, not even considering the cost of features that you'd have to buy from Akamai to make it a feature-equal comparison.
AWS, GCP, and Azure have CDNs as well, but those are more typically used by existing customers to front things running there.
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