Streaming videos from Google Cloud

Question

I am considering using Google App Engine and Google Cloud Platform for my project vs using Amazon AWS.

I need to be able to stream videos in large quantity and scale quickly if needed. App Engine looks great for load balancing, scaling and ease of use, but I don't see any streaming services. Does it mean that after storing my videos in Google Cloud Storage, I will have to use a third party CDN like Amazon Cloud Front to deliver my videos ?

What is the best approach for delivering videos on the Google Cloud platform?

Answer 1

Content that is stored in Google Cloud Storage as publicly-accessible will be cached by Google edge-caches by default. That caching will work for HTTP and progressive-streamed content, but not for real-time streaming protocols. The caches are shared with other Google content and are quite substantial - we see high cache-hit rates for even small applications that are serving static data repeatedly, so it's not as though you get crowded out of the cache by the latest viral YouTube video. However, we do not offer management functionality (e.g. cache pre-warming or invalidation) and currently offer limited reporting capability (cache access logs or differential billing for cache-served content) - for those more advanced features a full-featured CDN is still your best bet, and Google Cloud Storage serves just fine as an origin server.