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Google officials want to make it easier and less expensive for developers and businesses on the company’s cloud platform to move increasingly bandwidth-hungry Web and mobile apps to their end users.
The search giant is partnering with four content-delivery network (CDN) providers to create what officials are calling the CDN Interconnect, which is part of the Google Cloud Interconnect portfolio of services. Through the CDN Interconnect plan, developers and organizations that are customers of both the Google Cloud and one of the partner CDN providers will see the cost of moving their applications and files from the cloud, through the CDN and to their end users.
Google is looking to leverage the global footprint of its cloud networking infrastructure—there are more than 70 points of presence located in 33 countries—to enable businesses to get their products to customers more quickly and less expensively. They reach customers across the globe, and enable their end users to access content that is delivered from near where they are located will help reduce latency issues, according to Ofir Roval, product manager for Google Cloud Platform.
And as those apps and files get larger, finding ways to reduce the latency will become increasingly important in ensuring a good user experience.
“Some of the most popular categories of web and mobile apps loved by users today—social, gaming, video, news, communications—carry with them hefty media assets, from retina-density images to HD video,” Roval wrote in a post on the Google blog. “As payload size and media quality increase, users continue to expect low latency access to their favorite content. Whether it’s a real time plot of ride-sharing cars on your phone, a photo-rich app, or streaming HD music or video from the cloud, abundant choice in great services today makes users unlikely to tolerate laggy or unresponsive applications.”
By partnering with the CDN providers to reduce the prices for in-region Cloud Platform egress traffic to approved CDN locations, Google is helping drive lower latency while giving developers and other cloud users a break on the cost of delivering their products.
“CDN Interconnect’s special egress pricing should encourage the best practice of regularly distributing content originating from Cloud Platform out to the edge close to your end-users,” Roval wrote. “Google provides a private, high-performance link between Cloud Platform and the CDN providers we work with, allowing your content to travel a low-latency, reliable route from our data centers out to your users.”
Google’s CDN provider partners are CloudFlare, Fastly, Highwinds and Level 3 Communications. Roval wrote that “especially for heavy, frequently accessed content, using a CDN provider is highly recommended as it gives you granular control over how your content gets distributed globally in a way consistent with your users’ access patterns. And savings from our egress pricing can potentially compound if you’re making frequent pushes out to the edge to keep a ‘fresh cache’ for your users.”
Roval said developers should contact any of the CDN providers to establish a deployment plan with Google’s CDN Interconnect. The program can only make life easier for businesses using the cloud and their end customers, according to Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer for Level 3.
“With the continued rise in online and mobile applications has come the explosion of bandwidth-heavy content such as HD video, image-filled Web pages and streaming music, making it even more critical for content companies to use the right infrastructure to provide smooth and fast delivery,” Christie said in a statement.