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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

Azure has 3 CDN products from what I can tell. They have semi-overlapping feature sets, though I guess now HTTP/2 is taken care of. We were using one of them and experienced frequent timeouts. Switching to another fixed it. They don't explain why they have these different products in the first place, either.

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That is largely because Azure CDN unlike other azure services it is not really from Microsoft at all, it is basically re-branded solutions from two competing vendors who both have different feature sets, different service qualities ( as you noticed) and compete with each other.

This is also why it is not simple to deploy on both of them for the best coverage. Akamai has better PoPs in some markets and Verizon has better in others.

If you want to use both to their strengths it not possible directly from Azure, you will need to set up both services and then configure your DNS for geo-location routing based and track effectively in which geographies which would be better .

MS recommends also largely on these lines in their own docs "Azure CDN from Akamai POP locations are not individually disclosed. Both providers have distinct ways of building their CDN infrastructures. We recommend against using POP locations to decide which Azure CDN product to use, and instead consider features and end-user performance. Test the performance with both providers to choose the right Azure CDN product for your users."

Which makes Azure look like even more of a joke. They couldn't strike a real deal, buy or build a CDN - so they just integrate a couple? Then shrug and tell their customers to study sort it?

The CDN product wasn't like this a while ago - it was just one offering.

That's what I really don't like about Azure. They seem to have multiple differently named services that seem to basically do the same thing (Azure Service Bus/Azure Storage Queues is one example that comes to my mind)

Also, the Azure Portal is ridiculously bad and slow.

The Office 365 admin panel is also a piece of shit.

Azure storage queues are basically "queues lite" while the service bus is more full featured, think rabbitmq.

And the portal does indeed suck. The cli, on the other hand, is top notch.

Yup, but this took me way too long to figure out.

Sadly this goes for a lot of Azure services and all the enterprise-buzzword laden documentation doesn't make that easier

You should look at the various official blogs around Azure, they're much more down-to-earth and buzzword free than the formal docs.

Which CLI you mean? azure-xplat-cli or the new azure-cli (multiple differently named services that seem to basically do the same thing)?

I actually like the Azure portal more than AWS. The speed is annoying yes, and n-level menu structure was overwhelming at first but the ability to manage all services from single SPA makes it much better than the way AWS console handles it, also the ability to minimize and do multiple actions at the same time balances out the slowness.

I'm not sure what MSFT thinks is a good buyer experience on this. Buyer: I want to buy a CDN Msft: do you want the Verizon or the Akamai one? Buyer: um the CDN one? Msft: due to some corporate deals we've made you have to choose Buyer: %#]%^}^}%!!!1

Agreed. At least tell me the important difference between them. This CDN is focused on X, and this one is focused on Y.

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