- AWS has an edge network. Microsoft and Google have huge edge networks, with PoPs all over the place. Akamai also has a huge edge network. You also have to guess at the size of each PoP, which is just as important as having a PoP in a location.
- CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs.
- Streaming games is totally different than serving web pages. It requires specialized hardware and targeting. It's basically a whole different business.
CF has a great strategy, but it seems to be focusing more on using their agility to adopt WA and Rust early and turn them into advantages.
> CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs.
Do you have pointers to public data comparing services?
Just look up Maglev from Google. I mean, that stuff is years ahead of CF (don’t get me wrong, CF is fine).
Argo from CF is a year or so old and that sort of stuff was done like 10+ years ago at Akamai. Cotendo had a great system that was more impressive 5+ years ago.
Stackpath don’t have the sort of resources that CF has but have been doing edge compute for a while now (though not WASM).
This is why I asked for data: I was hoping someone might have some numbers for what this actually means in practice. For example, using the very broad numbers at https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn-compare?type=performance&locatio... shows that Google has the performance nod in North America but is slower in Africa, Oceania, and South America by over twice that margin where e.g. Akamai still has a substantial edge.
Those are also not numbers I'd want to base a serious decision on since when I've benchmarked CDNs in the past it usually came down to things like reliability and something like 90th percentile numbers since the median numbers were usually fast enough but the outliers were what made people mad. Similarly, some providers had surprisingly high DNS latency (500+ms!) in various parts of the world but delivered competitive performance after that, requiring some judgement.
- CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs.
- Streaming games is totally different than serving web pages. It requires specialized hardware and targeting. It's basically a whole different business.
CF has a great strategy, but it seems to be focusing more on using their agility to adopt WA and Rust early and turn them into advantages.