storage.googleapis.com might not be an optimal CDN

[jeffposnick]

Congrats on the Pika CDN launch!

I noticed that you're using the Google Storage API under the hood, with URLs like https://cdn.pika.dev/workbox-window/v4 redirecting to https://storage.googleapis.com/pika-web-packages-01/workbox-window/4.3.1/dist-es2019/workbox-window.min.js

We (the Workbox team) use the Google Storage API in a similar manner, but I thought it was worth pointing out that this is actually a bit slower, and likely more expensive than using a "real" CDN solution. My understanding is that you end up charged for a call to the Google Storage API each time one of those URLs are requested, and you can end up incurring a decent amount of usage charges when what you expect is static hosting.

We've had a longstanding goal to move to a real CDN, perhaps along the lines of the instructions at https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/https/adding-a-backend-bucket-to-content-based-load-balancing, but haven't yet found the time to do it.

I figured I'd at least mention it to your team since to the uninitiated, storage.googleapis.com kinda-sorta looks acts like a static CDN. (Though the "googleapis" bit is a giveaway.)

[FredKSchott]

Hey @jeffposnick, thanks for the message! I'm in a similar boat: just haven't had the time yet to move to a proper, edge-cached CDN and wanted to get this released sooner rather than later. It's a multi-regional US bucket so I assume US performance is good, but I'm excited to get it on a real CDN so that international folks get a better experience.

I'm also reaching out to partners like Google, Cloudflare, etc. to help sponsor the CDN & support the server costs. Is there anyone at Google who you could connect me to who would be interested in speaking about that? Happy to follow up with you via twitter as well.

[tadeuszwojcik]

@FredKSchott I think you could use Cloudflare free plan with unlimited bandwidth and still use GCS as origin.
I think that's what https://unpkg.com/ does.

[SukkaW]

@tadeuszwojcik Cloudflare is a great, but

1. unpkg is using Cloudflare Business Plan, not Free Plan.
2. Cloudflare is not friendly to some regions, for instance China.

[FredKSchott]

Thanks everyone for the discussion! I'm in contact with both Cloudflare & Google about getting a sponsored account. Closing this since it isn't @pika/web related, but feel free to move the convo over to https://spectrum.chat/pika.