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. 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.

Google’s networking footprint — over 70 points of presence across 33 countries — enables customers to serve a global audience from day one. Ensuring that end-users get fast access to content delivered from close to where they are geographically is key to low-latency performance.

Today Google is announcing collaborations with four of the industry’s leading CDN providers: CloudFlare, Fastly, Highwinds, and Level 3 Communications.

Called CDN Interconnect and part of the Google Cloud Interconnect family, effective today joint customers of these CDN providers and Google Cloud Platform are eligible to pay reduced prices for in-region Cloud Platform egress traffic (to approved CDN locations). Please check with your selected CDN provider for an up-to-date list of locations.

CDN Interconnect’s special egress pricing should encourage the best practice of regularly distributing content originating from Google Cloud Platform out to the edge close to your end-users. 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. 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.

As next steps, you're encouraged to work with the CDN provider of your choice to set up deployment for CDN Interconnect with Google. Once this is in place, you'll automatically begin enjoying reduced in-region egress pricing to your select destinations. We invite you to contact us if you encounter any issues or have additional questions.

- Posted by Ofir Roval, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform