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by chrisweekly 1796 days ago
Their APIs are (or, were, last I suffered their use a few years ago) also terrible, eg blanket policy of refusing to cache any resource in the presence of "Vary" header, regardless of its value, and failure to honor standard HTTP headers... thankfully there are many other options for CDN, which are SO MUCH BETTER.
2 comments
zxcvbn4038 1796 days ago
Akamai is their own worst enemy most of the time. Their prices are the highest, they trail on features, their documentation opaque, it takes an hour to propagate changes, etc. Only a few years ago you could only use SSL if you purchased their ridiculously expensive pci-dss plan - I thought they would defend that to their grave.

Better alternatives are Cloudflare, Fastly, AWS CloudFront.

Google Cloud CDN always seems to have very good latency but a very bare bones feature set and no edge compute I can identify. Support is always a huge red mark for Google anything.

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youngtaff 1796 days ago
Surely it depends what you vary on?

Content-Encoding should be well supported, User-Agent less so and for very good reasons (there's too much variation in UA strings)

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judge2020 1796 days ago
https://learn.akamai.com/en-us/webhelp/adaptive-media-delive...

> AMD automatically strips these headers out of requests to support caching for faster delivery.

> I need the Vary HTTP headers: AMD can cache the associated object if the Vary HTTP header contains only "Accept-Encoding" and "Gzip" is present in the Content-Encoding header

(AMD in this case standing for Akamai Media Delivery)

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acdha 1796 days ago
It wasn't that simple — IIRC, for a while Vary meant “don't cache anything, ever, under any circumstances” unless you made some custom configuration changes. Over time they _added_ support for just “Vary: Accept-Encoding” (IIRC less than a decade ago) and that was fragile. They improved that over time but it was painful for a number of years because there were various failure modes which meant things wouldn't be cached, or (IIRC) compression would be disabled for certain URLs sporadically if the first request for the option did not request transfer compression.
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