Recently, I've been asked by customers: Which high defense CDN do you use, and is the Huawei Cloud one good or not? To be honest, these days even CDN have to "defense teammates" - some service providers talk about "global acceleration", the actual CC attacks directly back to the source, this is not a pit?
It so happens that last month our team was doing security architecture upgrades, and I pulled out the Huawei Cloud high-defense CDN, the industry's veteran CDN5, and CDN07, which focuses on overseas, and tested them all in turn. The test method is very simple and brutal: directly to the test domain name to pour mixed traffic, to see which can withstand real attack scenarios.
Throwing conclusions first:This Huawei Cloud solution really stands up to the word 'enterprise-class' in the three core dimensions of node quality, defense accuracy, and stability. But don't be in a hurry to shell out money, there are some pits you need to know in advance.
The test environment was built with three architectures: Huawei Cloud high defense CDN, WAF acceleration package of CDN5, and Asia-Pacific preferred line of CDN07. Each set of configuration 10 core pages, including dynamic API and static resources, with LoaderRunner simulated 500QPS normal traffic + 200QPS attack traffic mixed request, continuous pressure testing for 6 hours.
The first round of measuring node coverage. Huawei Cloud is officially advertised as having 2800+ nodes, and the number of nodes that I can actually reach by parsing out with Dig commands is 137 (Asia-Pacific), which is in the middle of the number of nodes when compared to CDN5's 89 and CDN07's 211. But node quality is something that will be cheated just by looking at the number - I specifically picked the evening peak using MTR to trace the route, and found that Huawei Cloud Hong Kong node hops are controlled within 5 hops, and the Los Angeles node is on the CN2 GIA route. On the contrary, although CDN07 has many nodes, the latency of some Southeast Asian nodes soared to 380ms+.
Here's a detail worth boasting about: Huawei Cloud's edge nodes do TCP stack optimization. I grabbed a packet and saw that they changed the kernel parameters, the number of SYN retransmissions was reduced from the default 5 times to 3 times, and the TIME_WAIT state recovery time was compressed to 1 second. Don't underestimate this change, when encountering SYN Flood attack the connection pool will not be occupied, the actual test can carry 3000 more malformed packets per second.
Huawei Cloud's performance is a bit unexpected - UDP Flood is all cleaned at the edge nodes, without any traffic back to the source.CC attack triggered human verification, but the verification logic is a bit interesting: the same device will not pop up the verification code again within 24 hours after the first verification, but use the behavioral analysis engine to do silent verification. I took Selenium to simulate the browser behavior, until the 17th request to trigger the verification again, than CDN5 every 5 times to verify the experience is too good.
The most amazing thing is the slow attack protection. Many CDN vendors simply can't detect this kind of "warm water boiling frog" attack, Huawei Cloud actually took the initiative to choke off the slow connection 15 seconds after the connection was established, and also automatically sent a RST packet to the client. Later, I checked the documents and found that they used the self-developed SMP (Slow Attack Mitigation) algorithm, which even Cloudflare is a paid plug-in feature.
Posting the actual configured protection rules for the segment is the real deal:
I played a little dirty in the stability testing session - simulating regional network jitter. ChaosMesh was used to inject 30% packet loss into the test nodes for 10 minutes. 3 nodes in CDN5 went offline directly, and CDN07 triggered global load balancing, but switching took 47 seconds. Although Huawei Cloud also has 2 nodes with slow response, the intelligent scheduling system cuts the traffic to the Tokyo node within 12 seconds, which is completely unnoticeable by the user side.
Of course, it's not perfect. Found two problems: First, the domestic node filing process is a huge hassle to fill out a bunch of commitment to wait for 3 working days to review; Second, the logging system latency is high, the attack logs have to wait for 5-10 minutes to find out, not as good as the real-time logs of the 08Host flow.
Price, Huawei cloud belongs to the "meat pain but can save lives" class. The basic package starts at 20,000 per month, which is 40% more expensive than CDN5, but 20% cheaper than CDN07. The key is that there is no charge for excess cleaning traffic! Some vendors' cleaning fees are more expensive than the main package, but Huawei Cloud's point is true.
One final note to offend: don't believe in that "unlimited defense" crap. If you really encounter a DDoS of 800G or more, any vendor will pull you into a black hole. Huawei Cloud's advantage is that its defense algorithms are smarter, identifying and mitigating attacks at an early stage, rather than relying on bandwidth alone.
If your business is in the Asia Pacific region and you need to balance acceleration and security, Huawei Cloud High Defense CDN is really worth trying. But remember to have your record number ready in advance and pull critical logs for local storage - their log retention period is only 30 days, which is pretty pitiful.
Test data I packaged into Excel, need detailed data buddy can private me to send an e-mail. Security this matter never expect a vendor to be all-encompassing, multi-layered defense is the right way.
