Cloudflare or native cloud CDN?

Firstly, it is important to realize that most public clouds DO NOT have a ‘native’ CDN offering. They leverage existing CDNs such as akamai, Fastly, Highwinds, Level3 and EdgeCast. For instance, Google Cloud’s CDN Interconnect program uses all of these to provide global CDN capability within it’s GCP cloud platform.

Layer 7 Functionality in CDNs (not present in all CDNs)

Site acceleration (SA)

End to end SSL (via SSL offloading onto CDNs)

Web Application Firewall – Breach Protection

Cookie-based session affinity

URL path-based routing

Free certificates

Multiple domain management

Layer 3 and 4 features built into most CDNs

Routing Traffic

GeoFiltering

Monitoring Traffic

Content Caching, Content Compression

The Case for CloudFlare

Several of the Layer 3 and 4 features are built in. However, services such as CloudFlare also offer additional, commonly needed services around globally delivered content. This includes:

Breach protection : CloudFlare to protect our network from breaches as well as to reduce bandwidth on the servers themselves and therefore freeing up the bandwidth for our other projects.

Instant DNS Propagation:   Instant DNS propagation across the internet is rare. CloudFront can offer such propagation and can also be used for DNS hosting  (AnyCast DNS – which also supports DNSSEC + IPv6).

Free Included SSL:  This is a built-in feature with CloudFlare and you can eliminate internal encryption tools for images and static content such as email obfuscation.

Summary

When picking between a cloud native CDN offering, it is important to ask the question ‘What else can it offer besides Content Delivery?’  Does it offer breach protection? How about SSL Termination or Free SSL? Can I host DNS on the same service? These answers may help you decide between offerings such as CloudFront (AWS)  or Azure Front Door (Azure) and  CloudFlare’s CDN service.