Amazon has been in the CDN business for a few years now. They have proven themselves, and are making headway in the CDN industry. Microsoft is officially in the CDN business with its Azure CDN, delivering content from 29 POPs in North America, Europe, APAC and Australia. Google is the only one from the big three cloud service providers without a productized CDN offering. Google did roll out a product called Page Speed Service a few years back, but it doesn’t look like anything became of it. Currently, Google does have a “multi-tiered content delivery platform” with 70+ POPs in 33 countries, where they peer with many ISPs, and even own fiber in the ground, including some in the Pacific, however, its more for internal use.
It wouldn’t be too difficult for Google to create a productized CDN offering for its cloud business segment, since they’ve had an internal CDN for many years. Does Google have plans to create a CDN for its Google Cloud customers? They don’t have to if they don’t want to. They still can cache customer content at edge locations, and deliver it from there, behind the scenes, without the customers ever knowing about it. Or it can productize it, sell it, and even the playing field with Amazon and Microsoft. If Google were to roll out a CDN, would they impact the pure-play CDNs, including Akamai? Personally, I don’t think they would, as the CDN industry is much more diverse now.