Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Overview

Amazon CloudFront

Stacks21.4K

Followers10.8K

Votes935

Fastly

Stacks1.1K

Followers507

Votes153

Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Amazon CloudFront and Fastly, two popular content delivery network (CDN) services. Both CloudFront and Fastly are designed to improve the performance and speed of web applications, but they have some distinct differences that set them apart from each other.

Network Size and Global Coverage: One major difference between Amazon CloudFront and Fastly is the size of their network and global coverage. CloudFront, being a service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has an extensive global network with numerous edge locations spread across the world. These edge locations allow CloudFront to cache and serve content closer to end-users, resulting in faster response times. Fastly, on the other hand, has a smaller network compared to CloudFront, but it offers a high-performance and highly customizable CDN solution.
Pricing and Cost Structure: Another significant difference between CloudFront and Fastly is their pricing and cost structure. CloudFront adopts a pay-as-you-go model, where you only pay for the data transfer and other services you actually use. Additionally, CloudFront offers tiered pricing based on the volume of data transferred. Fastly, on the other hand, offers different pricing plans that are based on various factors, such as the number of edge locations, support level, and additional features. Fastly's pricing structure allows customers to choose a plan that best suits their specific requirements.
Ease of Use and Customization: When it comes to ease of use and customization options, CloudFront and Fastly offer different approaches. CloudFront is integrated with AWS services and provides a simplified setup process, making it easier for AWS customers to configure and manage their CDN. It also offers various features and tools to optimize content delivery. Fastly, on the other hand, offers a highly customizable CDN solution with an advanced configuration language called Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). This allows users to have fine-grained control over how their content is cached and delivered.
Security and DDoS Protection: Both CloudFront and Fastly offer robust security and DDoS protection mechanisms, but they have different approaches to achieve this. CloudFront integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as AWS Shield, allowing users to leverage advanced security features and protection against various types of attacks. Fastly, on the other hand, offers a range of security features, including real-time threat intelligence, web application firewall (WAF), and bot detection, to ensure the security and availability of web applications.
Real-time Analytics and Monitoring: CloudFront and Fastly provide real-time analytics and monitoring capabilities, but they differ in the level of detail and insights provided. CloudFront offers basic metrics and analytics through its AWS Management Console, including data transfer, requests, and cache hit rates. Fastly, however, provides a more comprehensive real-time analytics platform called BigQuery, which offers detailed insights into content delivery performance, audience segmentation, and other valuable metrics. Fastly's analytics platform is highly customizable and can integrate with other third-party analytics tools.
Integration and Ecosystem: Finally, CloudFront and Fastly differ in terms of integration and ecosystem. CloudFront is tightly integrated with the AWS ecosystem, allowing seamless integration with other AWS services like Amazon S3, EC2, and Lambda. This makes it an ideal choice for customers already using AWS infrastructure. Fastly, on the other hand, provides integrations with various third-party services and tools, including popular Content Management Systems (CMS) and DevOps tools. It also offers APIs and developer-friendly features to enable easy integration into existing workflows.

In summary, Amazon CloudFront and Fastly have distinct differences in terms of network size and coverage, pricing and cost structure, ease of use and customization, security and DDoS protection, real-time analytics and monitoring, and integration and ecosystem. Understanding these differences is crucial when choosing the right CDN solution for your specific requirements.

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Advice on Amazon CloudFront, Fastly

Francesco

CTO at ORDR.menu

Dec 1, 2021

Decided

I don't think I have registered a domain in the last 10 years that hasn't been linked to CloudFlare within the first 2 hours from registration.

The benefits you get from even the free version of CloudFlare are amazing. From day 0:

30/80% of bandwidth savings thanks to their CDN
Origin IP address protection
Managed SSL

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon CloudFront	Fastly
Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance.	Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.
Fast- Using a network of edge locations around the world, Amazon CloudFront caches copies of your static content close to viewers, lowering latency when they download your objects and giving you the high, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver large popular objects to end users at scale.;Simple- A single API call lets you get started distributing content from your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon EC2 instance or other origin server through the Amazon CloudFront network.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services Amazon CloudFront is designed for use with other Amazon Web Services, including Amazon S3, where you can durably store the definitive versions of your static files, and Amazon EC2, where you can run your application server for dynamically generated content.;Cost-Effective- Amazon CloudFront passes on the benefits of Amazon’s scale to you. You pay only for the content that you deliver through the network, without minimum commitments or up-front fees.;Elastic- With Amazon CloudFront, you don’t need to worry about maintaining expensive web-server capacity to meet the demand from potential traffic spikes for your content. The service automatically responds as demand increases or decreases without any intervention from you.;Reliable- Amazon CloudFront is built using Amazon’s highly reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of edge locations used by Amazon CloudFront automatically routes end users to the closest available location as required by network conditions.;Global- Amazon CloudFront uses a global network of edge locations, located near your end users in the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.	static content delivery; event-driven content delivery; Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA); API caching; Instant Purge; Soft Purge; surrogate keys; streaming and VOD; Real-time Analytics; instant configuration; instant deploys; built on Varnish; Custom VCL upload; on-demand DDoS mitigation; Transport Layer Security; PCI compliance and compliance services; Origin Shield; real-time streaming logs; Historical Stats; Edge Dictionaries; Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator; Configuration Control Panel; stale-if-error; stale-while-revalidate; Edge Side Includes (ESI); GeoIP/geography detection; mobile device detection; edge authorization/paywalls; shopper prioritization
Statistics
Stacks 21.4K	Stacks 1.1K
Followers 10.8K	Followers 507
Votes 935	Votes 153
Pros & Cons
Pros 245 Fast 166 Cdn 157 Compatible with other aws services 125 Simple 108 Global Cons 3 UI could use some work 1 Invalidations take so long	Pros 28 Real-time updates 26 Fastest CDN 22 Powerful API 20 Great support 14 Great customer support Cons 1 Minimum $50/mo spend
Integrations
No integrations available	Heroku WordPress Google BigQuery Magento Amazon S3 Zencoder Rackspace Cloud Files OpenStack Datadog Sumo Logic

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