Detailed Comparison of CDN Providers: Google Cloud vs. Amazon Cloud

This report provides a comparative analysis of Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers, with a primary focus on Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud. It examines their infrastructure, compute services, and cost structures, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. The report also discusses the benefits of using a CDN, particularly for businesses like real estate companies that require global accessibility. Furthermore, it explores other CDN providers like Microsoft Azure, Akamai, Cloudflare, and Edgecast, comparing their features and functionalities. The report concludes by assessing the suitability of Google Cloud for a real estate company based on its cost-effectiveness and global presence, providing insights into CDN selection and optimization.

Running head: COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
Comparison of Google cloud and amazon Cloud or web services:
Many companies are providing cloud services as Content delivery network (CDN) but
the competition for leadership is mainly between Amazon and Google as they hold a
commanding position among other companies in terms of Infrastructure as a service (Iaas)
and Platform as a service (Paas). Amazon has a vast set of tools that are growing
exponentially and thus the capabilities of Amazon Cloud service has no match (Frangoudis et
al. 2016). However, the cost structure of the Amazon Cloud service is a little complicated and
the focus of the structure is on public cloud rather than the private or hybrid cloud. This
suggests that interoperation with individual customer’s data is not the most priority of
Amazon Web Services. Google entered the cloud services market after Amazon and focuses
mainly on individual data rather than the corporate customers. Google has excellent technical
expertise and the company is well funded for doing researches in building industry-efficient
tools in the fields of artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, data analysis
which has several advantages in cloud services (Bang et al. 2016). The compute capacity of
Amazon web service is based on elastic compute cloud and container services. The elastic
compute Cloud (EC2) is supported in both windows and Linux offering high performance
computing, huge assortment of instances, auto scaling and a free tier for EC2 in which 750
hours in a month is offered for 12 months. Inside the compute category the different container
services like support Docker, Fargate service are offered which automates the server and
cluster management is performed using the containers. The compute service of google is
shorter than its competitors. The compute service is based on compute engine by which both
of the predefined and custom types are boasted with Windows and Linux support, automatic
discounts, pre-second billing and low energy usage in its data centres.
Now, a real estate business require a CDN as the real estate website originated in east coast of
US must be accessible from any location in the globe as anyone can buy a real estate in US. If

2COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
the real estate company do not integrate their website to any CDN then the customers from
other countries are likely to face problem for loading the site, transaction errors. This will in
turn loose a lot of customers and thus decrease profitability of the real estate business. Now,
when employed with the CDN cloud server the web content of the company is sent
strategically to a server depending on the location of the website visitor and the content is
then sent from that particular server to visitor’s computer and thus it takes less time to load
(Frangoudis, Yala and Ksentini 2017). Now, Amazon cloudfront is not entirely free and the
benefits are given to large corporate businesses, however, google cloud server is entirely free
and only a google account is required to get access in google cloud which is also free. Thus
for a real estate company located in the east coast of United States google cloud is best CDN
based on its expense, quick access feature and as the google centres are placed nearly all top
countries thus the performance of cloud service will also be good.
First response:
Microsoft Azure provides various services as a CDN to its customers which includes
Azure bot service, Azure Databricks, Azure Search, Bing autosuggest, Bing image search,
computer vision, face recognition, translator speech, Analytics services, Blockchain,
Compute service like virtual machines and CyberCloud services (Calder et al. 2018). The
CDN services offered by Akamai are innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution,
turnkey solution which helps the companies to start their own video streaming services and
then the network is optimized for the delivery of content and thus reducing the time of
deployment and costs of upfront (Akhtar et al. 2016). The CDN services of the google cloud
has seamless integration to network which provides use of the google cloud platform console
and the Stackdriver through which full visibility of operations performed in site is enabled.
The media CDN support of google cloud has the feature of including large files (up to 5 TB)
and thus it is the ideal platform for gaming and delivering media through the globe.

3COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
Second response:
Through Amazon Cloudfront the distribution of the static and the dynamic web is
speeded up for web contents like .css, .js, .html and for the image files. The content is
delivered by the cloudfront through the data centres at worldwide locations which are known
as edge locations. Cloudfare content delivery is ultra-fast and dynamic with increased agility
and control and secured DDoS protection. The caching content on the Cloudfare mainly
reduces the need for sourcing the content from origin and thus the cost is reduced (Persico,
Montieri and Pescapè 2016). The edgecast CDN is made by Verizon Digital Media Services
and they offer caching in static basis and content acceleration in a dynamic way with vast
connection in TLS. Additionally, an Anycast DNS is provided on a PCI-DSS compliant
network (Bos 2017). The main security features in edgecast is Web application firewall,
authentication of the tokens, mitigation of DDoS and DNSSEC. The companies using
edgecast CDN for their websites have granular control associated with the self-service portal,
rules engine and API.

4COMPARISON OF CDN PROVIDERS
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IEEE Communications Magazine, 54(6), pp.94-100.
Bos, E., 2017, July. Analyzing the performance of Cloudflare’s anycast CDN, a case study.
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