Google Kickstarts Its Own Content Delivery Network

Google has started dishing out a new cloud service in the form of Google Cloud CDN (Content-Delivery Network).

The service will allow developers to load their applications faster by placing resources closer to them, reducing latency and boosting speed.

It’s currently in Alpha release, which means users have to apply to Google to be able to test out the service.

Going global

“Google Cloud CDN uses Google’s globally distributed edge caches to cache HTTP(S) Load Balanced content close to your users,” explains Google. “Caching content at the edges of Google’s network provides faster delivery of content to your users while reducing the load on your servers.”

Rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a similar service, called CloudFront CDN, with Microsoft Azure also offering up a CDN service. Google’s move comes at a time when competition between the big public cloud providers is really heating up as IBM, Microsoft, and AWS open new data centres around the world.

Microsoft will launch a fleet of data centres and a dedicated Azure cloud region in the UK in 2016. Revealing the news at the company’s annual Future Decoded event in London, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the region is to “empower” every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more.

Amazon Web Services is opening a new region in the UK. The region and its data centres will be the third such region in the EU, and will go hand in hand with regions in Dublin and Frankfurt to expand AWS’ European efforts in cloud computing. AWS said it is hoping the region will be up and running by the end of 2016.

By opening more data centres, cloud providers can attract more customers as latency and distance to those customers is reduced, bringing a more enticing cloud service to the region.

The news comes after an October deal between CDN provider Akamai and Google to expand Google’s 10GB Ethernet networks.

By expanding its CDN plans, Google can use its network end points to channel more content through to more regions around the world, effectively negating the need for the fleets of giant data centres currently being built by Microsoft and Amazon.

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