Google Has Not Launched an Akamai Competitor

Google has officially launched a customer facing CDN which they call “Google Cloud CDN”. We say customer facing because Google has always had an internal CDN to deliver their own content, including Youtube. The question begs itself, is Google a competitor to Akamai and all other CDNs? We’ll answer that in a bit. First, this is a logical move for Google, since Amazon has a CDN. Thus, in order for Google to be in the same conversation as the cloud powerhouse Amazon, a customer facing CDN is a must.

With that being said, Google is not a direct competitor to Akamai and other CDNs at the present time. Google provides a very specific and narrow solution. If you read the fine print, Google clearly states their product is “globally distributed edge caches to cache HTTP(S) load balanced content close to your users.” Furthermore, Google states that “Cloud CDN works as part of an HTTP(S) load balancing configuration. You must use Compute Engine HTTP(S) load balancing on your instances to use Cloud CDN”.

So is Google a Global CDN providing an extensive CDN feature set? No, Google Cloud CDN is a glorified load balancing solution that is a good fit for companies already using Google Compute Engine. Also, their pricing of $.08/GB is a little bit on the high side.

Google Load Balancing Pricing