Amazon CloudFront vs Bare Metal Solution Comparison

A

Why choose Amazon CloudFront

• Has a free plan (Bare Metal Solution does not)
• Higher Scalability score (10/10 vs 5/10)
• Higher Analytics score (7/10 vs 4/10)
• Better fit for startups (7/10 vs 2/10)
• Better fit for small business (5/10 vs 1/10)

B

Why choose Bare Metal Solution

• Includes Dedicated Servers, which Amazon CloudFront lacks

A

Amazon CloudFront

Pros

• The network is very large, with more than 750 PoPs plus over 1,140 PoPs embedded inside ISP networks.
• Data transfer from AWS origins such as S3 and EC2 to CloudFront costs nothing, which lowers costs for workloads hosted on AWS.
• Flat-rate plans start at $15 a month with no overage charges, which makes bills predictable.
• It has strong compliance coverage, including PCI-DSS Level 1, HIPAA, SOC, ISO and FedRAMP Moderate.
• Two tiers of edge compute are available: CloudFront Functions at $0.10 per million invocations and Lambda@Edge for heavier code.

Cons

• G2 and Capterra reviewers report complex configuration and a steep learning curve for people new to AWS.
• Capterra-network reviewers rate customer support poorly, around 3.4 out of 5.
• Flat-rate plans lack some features, such as real-time logs, dedicated IP SSL and continuous deployment, and going over the allowance reduces performance.
• Dedicated IP SSL at $600 a month and Anycast Static IPs at $3,000 a month are expensive extras.
• Users on AWS re:Post and GitHub report cache invalidations that occasionally hang for hours or time out during deploys.

B

Bare Metal Solution

Pros

• Single-tenant physical servers let Oracle BYOL be counted on physical cores, with no soft-partitioning risk.
• Low-latency, Google-managed interconnect to Google Cloud services, with no reported same-region transfer charges.
• A wide range of server sizes, including an 8-core option for licence right-sizing and up to 24 TB memory systems.
• A 99.9% uptime SLO per server, with credits of 10% to 50% of the monthly bill when it is missed.
• Available in 12 regions across four continents.

Cons

• No public pricing; every deployment goes through sales on a multi-year subscription.
• Customers handle OS licensing, patching, security and database administration; Google manages only the hardware and network.
• Storage volumes cannot be expanded after provisioning, and jumbo frames are not supported on VLAN attachments.
• Production deployments have historically needed four to eight weeks of lead time.
• Very few public user reviews (G2 lists only 4).