Is Google Cloud Storage an automagical global CDN?

Question

I’m attempting to setup a Google Cloud Storage bucket to store and serve all the static objects for my site. I’m also attempting to push all the objects in that bucket out t

Answer 1

Cloud CDN and Cloud Storage are distinct, so objects in your multi-region bucket are not necessarily pushed to Cloud CDN edges. You can find information about Cloud Storage regions here; as you probably already know, Cloud CDN's edge locations are mapped out here. However, it's very straightforward to integrate Cloud Storage with Cloud CDN: just follow these steps!

Answer 2

Oct 2020 - Yes - if you take Google's word for it:

Cloud Storage essentially works as a content delivery network. This does not require any special configuration because by default any publicly readable object is cached in the global Cloud Storage network.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java11/serving-static-files

Answer 3

The best discussion I've seen of Cloud Storage edge caching vs. Cloud CDN was during the Google Cloud Next '18 session Best Practices for Storage Classes, Reliability, Performance and Scalability. The entire video is useful, but here's link to the content distribution topic.

One key note from the summary is that edge caching gives you many of the benefits of a CDN, but you still pay for data egress. The Cloud CDN gives you caching, which can lower the cost of egress. The also outlined a couple other options.