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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. CDN
  4. CDN
  5. Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Akamai
Akamai
Stacks1.9K
Followers442
Votes0
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Stacks21.4K
Followers10.8K
Votes935
Fastly
Fastly
Stacks1.1K
Followers507
Votes153

Akamai vs Amazon CloudFront vs Fastly: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Fastly

1. **Global Reach**: Akamai has one of the most extensive global networks with servers in over 130 countries, providing unparalleled coverage. Amazon CloudFront and Fastly also have global reach but may not have the same extensive network as Akamai, impacting response times and availability in certain regions.
   
2. **Pricing Structure**: Amazon CloudFront offers competitive pricing with pay-as-you-go options, making it suitable for small to large scale businesses. Akamai, on the other hand, is known for its premium pricing model, tailored towards enterprise-level clients. Fastly falls in between both, offering flexible pricing plans that can cater to a wide range of businesses.
   
3. **Security Features**: Akamai is recognized for its robust security features, including DDoS protection, web application firewall, and bot management, making it a preferred choice for organizations prioritizing security. While Amazon CloudFront and Fastly also provide security features, they may not offer the same level of comprehensive security as Akamai.
  
4. **Content Delivery Performance**: Akamai has a proven track record of delivering fast and reliable content delivery, leveraging its vast network infrastructure and advanced caching mechanisms. Amazon CloudFront and Fastly also offer impressive performance but may not be as optimized as Akamai in certain scenarios, resulting in potentially slower load times.
   
5. **Customization and Control**: Fastly stands out for its high level of customization and control, allowing users to tailor caching rules and configurations to specific needs. While Amazon CloudFront also offers some flexibility in customization, Akamai provides a more structured approach that may not offer as much granular control as Fastly.
   
6. **Support and Customer Service**: Akamai is known for its excellent customer support, offering dedicated account managers and 24/7 technical assistance to ensure smooth operations. Amazon CloudFront and Fastly also provide support services, but it may not be as personalized or comprehensive as Akamai's support system.

In Summary, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, and Fastly differ in global reach, pricing structures, security features, content delivery performance, customization options, and level of support provided to customers. Each platform caters to unique requirements and preferences based on individual business needs.

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Advice on Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly

Francesco
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
53k views53k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Akamai
Akamai
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront
Fastly
Fastly

If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.

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.

Protect your apps and APIs, stop credential abuse, and move to a Zero Trust security model with the world’s most powerful edge security platform; Focus on increasing revenue with powerful data and automation built to enhance customer experience on web and mobile applications; Deliver and monetize high-quality and secure online streaming experiences; Quickly integrate Akamai into existing developer workflows, streamlining cloud deployment and delivery
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
1.9K
Stacks
21.4K
Stacks
1.1K
Followers
442
Followers
10.8K
Followers
507
Votes
0
Votes
935
Votes
153
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
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
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Cloudability
Cloudability
No integrations available
Heroku
Heroku
WordPress
WordPress
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Magento
Magento
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Zencoder
Zencoder
Rackspace Cloud Files
Rackspace Cloud Files
OpenStack
OpenStack
Datadog
Datadog
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic

What are some alternatives to Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly?

CloudFlare

CloudFlare

Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.

KeyCDN

KeyCDN

KeyCDN offers super fast and secure content delivery for minimal loading time. In addition to the CDN, it also offers advanced image processing and many other features such as live logs and Let's Encrypt SSL.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN

The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them.

jsDelivr

jsDelivr

jsDelivr is a free CDN for open source developers, with advanced features for javascript projects with access to NPM and Github It uses multiple CDN providers, resulting in the best possible uptime and performance.

Moovweb XDN

Moovweb XDN

All-in-one platform to develop, deploy, preview, experiment on, monitor, and run your frontend.

Limelight CDN

Limelight CDN

Whether it’s your website, mobile applications, videos, music, software, games, or APIs, your content needs to reach customers quickly, reliably, and securely. It provides the capacity, coverage, and performance to cost-effectively deliver a better experience for you and your customers.

cdnjs

cdnjs

Everyone loves the Google CDN? Even Microsoft runs their own CDN. The problem is, they only host the most popular libraries. We host it all - JavaScript, CSS, SWF, images, etc! Powered by CloudFlare.

Statically

Statically

A free, fast, & modern CDN for open source projects, WordPress, images, and any static assets.

Incapsula

Incapsula

Through an application-aware, global content delivery network (CDN), Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed security, DDoS protection, load balancing and failover solutions.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare CDN

A CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a web site: Cached content: By caching web site content, It helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server.

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