What is Google Cloud CDN used for?

Google Cloud CDN is a content delivery network that caches content on Google's edge network and can front origins on Google Cloud or elsewhere. It is a good fit for accelerating websites hosted on Google Cloud and fronting on-premises origins with a managed CDN.

How much does Google Cloud CDN cost?

Google Cloud CDN is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based billing. Cache data transfer out is $0.08 per GiB in North America or Europe for the first 10 TiB, plus cache fill from $0.01 per GiB and $0.0075 per 10,000 lookup requests.

Is Google Cloud CDN open source?

No. Google Cloud CDN is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Google Cloud CDN include NGINX.

What are some alternatives to Google Cloud CDN?

Google Cloud CDN competes with Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare and Fastly. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Google Cloud CDN alternatives.

Google Cloud CDN: features, pricing and alternatives

About Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud CDN is the content delivery service of Google Cloud. It caches content at Google's edge locations so that users receive web pages, images and media from a point near them, reducing latency and the load on the origin servers behind it.

It is delivered through Google Cloud's load balancing layer, so teams enable it on a backend and let the platform handle caching. Per Google's description, it can deliver content hosted on-premises or in another cloud as well as in Google Cloud, using Google's distributed infrastructure.

Cloud CDN is a commercial, usage-billed service within Google Cloud, aimed at organizations that already run workloads on that platform or want to use Google's network for delivery. Pricing is documented on the Google Cloud pricing pages.

Key features

Edge caching on Google's global network
Integration with Google Cloud load balancing
Origins on Google Cloud, on-premises or other clouds
Reduced origin load and latency
Managed by Google Cloud tooling and APIs

Good fit for

→Accelerating websites hosted on Google Cloud
→Fronting on-premises origins with a managed CDN

Tags: cdn; google-cloud; content-delivery; edge-caching; cloud; web-performance

Google Cloud CDN: questions and answers

What is Google Cloud CDN used for?: Google Cloud CDN is a content delivery network that caches content on Google's edge network and can front origins on Google Cloud or elsewhere. It is a good fit for accelerating websites hosted on Google Cloud and fronting on-premises origins with a managed CDN.
How much does Google Cloud CDN cost?: Google Cloud CDN is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based billing. Cache data transfer out is $0.08 per GiB in North America or Europe for the first 10 TiB, plus cache fill from $0.01 per GiB and $0.0075 per 10,000 lookup requests.
Is Google Cloud CDN open source?: No. Google Cloud CDN is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Google Cloud CDN include NGINX.
What are some alternatives to Google Cloud CDN?: Google Cloud CDN competes with Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare and Fastly. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Google Cloud CDN alternatives.