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    Object Storage Service:What are the differences between OSS transfer acceleration and CDN acceleration?

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    Object Storage Service:What are the differences between OSS transfer acceleration and CDN acceleration?

    Last Updated:Jul 03, 2023

    Overview

    This topic describes the differences between the transfer acceleration feature of Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) and CDN acceleration so that you can choose which one is most suitable for your business.

    Details

    OSS provides unlimited, secure, cost-effective, and reliable storage and is a preferred choice for users to store static resources and objects. The speed of accessing resources and objects in OSS depends on factors such as the client network, outbound bandwidth, bucket region, and access link length.

    How access is accelerated

    CDN acceleration and OSS transfer acceleration use different mechanisms to accelerate access to OSS.

    • CDN acceleration: CDN is a distributed network that is built on top of a bearer network and consists of points of presences (POPs) across the world. CDN serves to reduce back-to-origin traffic. This in turn prevents network congestion and ensures that content is delivered with minimal latency across regions in various use cases. Static data in OSS is cached on globally distributed CDN POPs so that clients can retrieve data directly from POPs for faster access.

    • Transfer acceleration: OSS uses data centers that are distributed around the globe to perform transfer acceleration. When a request to access your bucket is sent, the request is parsed and routed to the data center where the bucket is located over the optimal network path and protocol. The transfer acceleration feature provides an optimized end-to-end acceleration solution for access to OSS over the Internet.

    Access acceleration scenarios

    Transfer acceleration optimizes access over an acceleration endpoint and supports all features that are available in OSS. CDN caches OSS data on POPs to accelerate access to OSS and reduce bandwidth costs. Transfer acceleration and CDN acceleration are designed for different scenarios. For more information, see Common scenarios and Enable transfer acceleration.

    • If you want to accelerate access to a third-party source, we recommend that you use CDN acceleration.

    • If your data in OSS is expected to be downloaded many times and strong consistency is not required, we recommend that you use CDN acceleration.

    • If you want to accelerate downloads of infrequently accessed resources in OSS, we recommend that you use transfer acceleration.

    • If your data in OSS is expected to be downloaded many times and strong consistency is required, we recommend that you use transfer acceleration.

    • If your business requires storage of dynamic resources that involve frequent updates, we recommend that you use transfer acceleration.

    • If your business requires storage of static resources that involve few updates, we recommend that you use CDN acceleration.

    Comparison between CDN acceleration and OSS transfer acceleration

    The following table provides a detailed comparison between CDN acceleration and OSS transfer acceleration.

    Acceleration method

    Implementation method

    Scenario

    Advantage

    Disadvantage

    CDN acceleration

    Uses POPs distributed around the world to cache OSS data for faster access.

    • Websites or applications that store medium- and small-sized files

    • Downloads of large files

    • On-demand audio and video streaming

    • CDN has a large number of POPs that are distributed across regions around the globe.

    • CDN POPs offer a large amount of bandwidth.

    • CDN provides a high cache hit ratio for resources that are frequently accessed and a low cache hit ratio for resources that are infrequently accessed. If a cache miss occurs, the access request is redirected to OSS over the public network.

    • CDN is designed to accelerate access to static resources, but does not provide noticeable performance improvements for dynamic requests such as uploads and deletions.

    OSS transfer acceleration

    Accelerates access to OSS over an optimal network path between clients and OSS servers. Resource requests are stilled made to OSS.

    • Acceleration of long-distance data transfers

    • Acceleration of uploads and downloads of gigabyte-grade and terabyte-grade objects

    • Acceleration of downloads of dynamic and cold data

    • OSS data centers are distributed across regions around the globe.

    • Transfer acceleration significantly accelerates data transfers for uploads and downloads of large objects over long distances.

    • All resource requests are made to OSS, which consumes a large amount of bandwidth.

    • Transfer acceleration provides lower acceleration performance than CDN acceleration when a large number of requests for a resource are made to OSS from the same region. Only HTTPS requests are supported.

    References

    Applicable scope

    • OSS

    • CDN