CDN Shopping Gets Real: Egress Math vs. AWS Gravity
Backblaze compares AWS CloudFront and bunny.net across CDN factors including network footprint (PoPs), caching features, compression, DDoS protection, integrations, and pricing. The article highlights bunny.net features such as Origin Shield, Perma-Cache, and request coalescing, and contrasts CloudFront’s tighter integration with AWS services and optional AWS Shield Advanced. Pricing examples are provided to illustrate differences in per-GB egress costs and request-fee policies, with mention of free egress between bunny.net and Backblaze B2 when paired.
Key Takeaways
- CloudFront’s core advantage is AWS-native integration (S3/IAM/security tooling), which can reduce operational friction but increases ecosystem lock-in.
- bunny.net differentiates on caching features (Origin Shield, Perma-Cache, request coalescing) aimed at improving cache hit rates and origin load—useful for large objects and video segments.
- Pricing models diverge: bunny.net emphasizes low per-GB rates and no request fees; CloudFront adds tiered regional pricing and request-based charges beyond free-tier limits.
- Backblaze claims a large cost delta in example scenarios (e.g., 5TB EU/NA: ~$50 bunny.net vs. ~$425 CloudFront) and highlights free egress when bunny.net is paired with Backblaze B2.
- Security positioning differs: bunny.net includes baseline DDoS protections; CloudFront can be paired with AWS Shield Advanced for more robust protection at added cost.
Why It Matters
For streaming teams, “CDN choice” is increasingly a finance and architecture decision, not a pure performance bake-off. Hyperscalers win on integrated security and governance, but the real lever is often egress economics and operational complexity—especially as services unbundle across storage, compute, and delivery. Bunny.net + Backblaze B2 is effectively an anti-egress-tax bundle, while CloudFront’s gravity keeps workloads (and spend) inside AWS. The emerging meme: the edge is getting commoditized, and differentiation shifts to cache-hit engineering, pricing simplicity, and avoiding surprise line items (requests, Shield, cross-cloud transfer).
Read full article at backblaze.com
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