No matter what your enterprise’s applications or websites do, your users could be distributed across different regions/locations and may not necessarily be close to your servers. This means that conducting long-distance transfers over the internet will result in inconsistent and potentially frustrating user experiences. This is why businesses need Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network)!
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
What is Cloud CDN?
Cloud CDN is a Content Delivery Network that utilizes Google’s global edge network to bring content as close as possible to your users. This speeds up the delivery of your web pages and video content while effectively reducing content transmission latency, ensuring consistent website loading speeds worldwide. With multiple endpoint servers serving as points of presence (POPs), Cloud CDN allows users to access data from the server nearest to them when requesting data, without the need to connect back to the original server.
What benefits does using Cloud CDN offer to businesses?
The previous paragraph explained what Cloud CDN is, and I believe you now have a basic understanding of it. Cloud CDN allows users to access content through the nearest server to them rather than a single server. It achieves “reduced network latency when accessing content due to distance,” “enhanced website stability,” which is one way for businesses to improve user experience and satisfaction. Handling multiple users’ requests through multiple CDN servers can “increase load capacity” to ensure “uninterrupted service.” Additionally, Cloud CDN’s caching effectively reduces the data and traffic that the main service needs to provide, thus “lowering bandwidth costs.” Implementing a CDN also helps “protect websites from malicious attacks” because users access the content using non-original IP addresses.
Cloud CDN Features and Characteristics
Now that we’ve discussed what Cloud CDN is and the benefits it brings to businesses, let’s delve into the features and characteristics of Cloud CDN.
Source and Backend Support
Cloud CDN can fetch content from any source with HTTP capabilities, including Compute Engine (GCE), Cloud Storage (GCS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) backends, as well as third-party sources beyond those mentioned.
Path Matching and Origin Selection
Cloud CDN utilizes Cloud Load Balancing to provide comprehensive routing and configuration capabilities at each edge location. If you’re already using Cloud Load Balancing, simply check a checkbox in the interface to enable Cloud CDN service for HTTP(S) load balancing, efficiently delivering content to users.
Support for New Protocol Versions
Cloud CDN supports new protocol versions such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, QUIC, and Global Anycast. This can address render-blocking web content, reduce the time it takes to start and recache video playback, ultimately enhancing the user experience.
Logging and Metrics
Through Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring, you can understand how Cloud CDN handles traffic, and logs can be imported into Cloud Storage and BigQuery for data analysis.
Robust Security
Applications can use managed SSL (TLS) certificates, customizable SSL policies, and audit logs. Signed requests allow you to serve responses through Google Cloud’s globally distributed cache, even when requests require authorization. Cloud CDN integrates with Cloud Armor to provide web application firewall (WAF) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation capabilities, protecting your web applications and services at Google’s scale.
Support for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Architectures
Cloud CDN allows customers to deliver content hosted on on-premises systems or other cloud services through Google’s distributed, high-performance edge caching infrastructure.
Image description: Cloud CDN needs to be used in conjunction with HTTP(S) Load Balancer to deliver content to users.
Cloud CDN New Features Introduction
Cloud CDN New Feature: Dynamic Compression
With dynamic compression, Cloud CDN automatically reduces the response size transmitted from the edge to the client, even if the source server is not compressed. Cloud CDN proactively compresses these resources. In popular CSS and JavaScript files, dynamic compression can reduce response sizes by 60% to 80%.
Both web services and end-users can benefit from the dynamic compression feature:
- Accelerated Page Loading: By reducing the size of CSS and JavaScript resources, it can decrease the time for initial content rendering and page loading.
- Cost Control: When web pages have a significant amount of compressible content, using dynamic compression can save on cache traffic egress costs.
Cloud CDN currently supports gzip and Brotli compression for web resources such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, HLS playlists, DASH lists, and more.
Cloud CDN New Feature: Custom Cache Keys
When a request reaches the CDN edge, the request is mapped to a cache key and compared with items in the cache. By default, the CDN uses the protocol, host, path, and query string of the URI to define the cache key. With custom cache keys, you have better control over caching behavior to improve cache hit rates and source routing. Cloud CDN supports named headers and Cookies as cache keys, which are especially useful when your web service is conducting A/B tests or Canary testing.
Additionally, Cloud CDN allows URI parameters for Cloud Storage, enabling you to implement Cache Busting. This is a caching policy that allows end-users to access the latest version of cached resources, even when the old version is still active. By including version query parameters in the allowed list, you don’t need to manually invalidate old caches.
Microfusion is a Google Cloud Premier Partner, helping numerous renowned enterprises implement Cloud CDN. Our clients span various industries, including media, e-commerce, retail, IT, and gaming. Feel free to fill out the contact form, and let our dedicated Microfusion consultants enhance your website’s stability, protect it from malicious attacks, and further elevate the user experience!
This article is adapted from Google Cloud’s official blog (Source 1 & Source 2) and the Cloud CDN official product page.
