Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal lands mid-arc in Google Cloud's 2015 platform-building push: months after the Cloud Launcher opened one-click deployment of 120-plus open-source packages, Google is solving the other half of serving an app — getting content off Google Cloud Storage and onto users' screens quickly. Rather than forcing everything through its own edge, it lets four independent CDNs — Cloudflare, Fastly, Level 3 and Highwinds — pull directly from Google Cloud.
First-order effects
- Developers hosting content on Google Cloud gain same-day access to four established delivery networks, choosing among them instead of waiting for Google to build equivalent global edge capacity.
- Fastly, Cloudflare, Level 3 and Highwinds each get a new inbound-traffic channel: every Google Cloud customer becomes a potential customer without separate origin infrastructure.
Second-order effects
- The partnership plants the seeds of co-opetition — Google's own delivery ambitions eventually surfaced as the Media CDN built on YouTube's infrastructure, which competes with the very CDNs this deal courted.
- Cloudflare's later Bandwidth Alliance with Microsoft, Google, Automattic and Backblaze extends this logic to pricing, attacking the interconnect and egress fees that make multi-cloud delivery expensive.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hyperscale clouds treat third-party CDNs as transitional partners: rent reach first, then internalize it on owned backbone — squeezing independent CDNs toward differentiation on developer tooling, security services and price alliances rather than raw distribution.
The trend: Content delivery is migrating from rented third-party CDN edges toward cloud providers' own global backbones, leaving independent CDNs to compete on services and bandwidth economics.