KeyCDN vs AWS CloudFront

Before I commit to KeyCDN for my little blog I wanted to check if CloudFront is better. Why? Because I already have an AWS account set up, familiar with boto3, it's what we use for work, and it's AWS so it's usually pretty good stuff. As an attractive bonus, CloudFront has 44 edge locations (KeyCDN 34).

Price-wise it's hard to compare because the AWS CloudFront pricing page is hard to read because the costs are broken up by regions. KeyCDN themselves claim KeyCDN is about 2x cheaper than CloudFront. This seems to be true if you look at cdnoverview.com's comparison too. CloudFront seems to have more extra specific costs. For example, with AWS CloudFront you have to pay to invalidate the cache whereas that's free for KeyCDN.

I also ran a little global latency test comparing the two using Hyperping using 7 global regions. The results are as follows:

KeyCDN on Hyperping.io

CloudFront on Hyperping.io

Take these with a pinch of salt because it's only an average for the last 1 hour. Let's agree that they both faster than your regular Nginx server in a single location.

By the way, both KeyCDN and CloudFront support Brotli compression. For CloudFront, this was added in July 2018 and if your origin can serve according to Content-Encoding you simply tell CloudFront to cache based on that header.

Although I've never tried it CloudFront does have an API for doing cache invalidation (aka. purging) and you can use boto3 to do it but I've never tried it. For KeyCDN here's how you do cache invalidation with the python-keycdn-api:

api = keycdn.Api(settings.KEYCDN_API_KEY)
call = "zones/purgeurl/{}.json".format(settings.KEYCDN_ZONE_ID)
all_urls = [
    'origin.example.com/static/foo.css',
    'origin.example.com/static/foo.cssbr',
    'origin.example.com/images/foo.jpg',
]
params = {"urls": all_urls}
response = api.delete(call, params)
print(response)

I'm not in love with that API but I know it issues the invalidation fast whereas with CloudFront I heard it takes a while to take effect.