Is Google Cloud Storage an automagical global CDN?

Question

I’m attempting to setup a Google Cloud Storage bucket to store and serve all the static objects for my site. I’m also attempting to push all the objects in that bucket out to all the global edge locations offered by Google Cloud CDN.

I’ve created a bucket on Google Cloud Storage: cdn.mysite.com. I chose “US” multi-region for the bucket location setting.

My assumption is that any object stored in this bucket will be replicated to all the us-* regions for high-durability purposes, but not pushed out to all the Google Cloud CDN global edge locations for CDN purposes.

Or are all my objects in my “US” multi-region bucket already automagically pushed out to all of Google Cloud CDN edge locations?

I’m gobsmacked that I can’t figure out whether or not my bucket is already a CDN or not. Even after two days of searching (Google, ironically).

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

The best discussion I've seen of Cloud Storage edge caching vs. Cloud CDN was during the Google Cloud Next '18 session Best Practices for Storage Classes, Reliability, Performance and Scalability. The entire video is useful, but here's link to the content distribution topic.

One key note from the summary is that edge caching gives you many of the benefits of a CDN, but you still pay for data egress. The Cloud CDN gives you caching, which can lower the cost of egress. They also outlined a couple other options.

Answer 2

Cloud CDN and Cloud Storage are distinct, so objects in your multi-region bucket are not necessarily pushed to Cloud CDN edges. You can find information about Cloud Storage regions here; as you probably already know, Cloud CDN's edge locations are mapped out here. However, it's very straightforward to integrate Cloud Storage with Cloud CDN: just follow these steps!