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Comment by aclelland | Hacker News Reader

At $JOB, we have a similar issue with static content. We serve over 1PB a month and the price AWS would charge to use CloudFront is an order of magnitude larger than even a Cloudflare Enterprise plan (which comes with some nice bells and whistles that Cloudfront doesn't offer).

Even with discounts from AWS it just doesn't make sense to use AWS to serve up the assets to users.

We do use S3 as our static asset backend and the combination works really well. I would love to see Cloudflare release a S3 compatible storage service though. I think we'd jump onto that in a heartbeat.

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Backblaze has S3-compatible API and they have free data transfer to Cloudflare

The last time I looked at BB S3 API they didn't offer the lifecycle controls that AWS over. Mainly the ability to remove old versions of files after a period of time and we didn't want to roll our own expiry solution. Might be worth looking again though.

Yep, B2 does offer this capability now. They've been working hard to add S3-compatible/similar features.

"Lifecycle rules instruct the B2 service to automatically hide and/or delete old files. You can set up rules to do things like delete old versions of files 30 days after a newer version was uploaded."

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/lifecycle_rules.html

Art from Backblaze here...Thanks for the feedback! As treesknees points out, we currently support lifecycle rules with our B2 Native API and our web application - those are available right now if you need to do it ASAP. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/lifecycle_rules.html

CloudFront is also a pretty inferior product in the CDN marketplace. Why do you think Amazon's retail business signed a huge contract with Fastly to be their primary CDN for all mission critical retail images? CloudFront sucks. Not competitive on price, features, performance or anything other than "we already pay AWS so might as well use it".

What is the best CDN offering right now in your opinion?

If you want raw speed/features/reach, then Fastly or Akamai.

CloudFlare's CDN is competitive on features and price but it isn't a market leader in terms of raw speed.

Raw speed in what way?

Cloudflare. Their performance, pricing, and Workers platform means you can build whatever you need.

One advantage of CloudFront is support for uploading large files (5GB+) to the origin server. CDNs tend to enforce a low size limit for uploads. It’s probably an uncommon use case, but the reduced client-side latency is nice for customers who are far away from the origin.

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