A couple of days ago, we were working on a website and wanted to add a CDN. It sounded like a small change, and in engineering terms, it was. On the bill, it wasn't.

The setup was already fine

Right now, we run the website on Google Cloud Run with request-based instances. The site doesn't get much traffic yet, and with request-based billing you only pay when something actually hits it. The result is a bill of around a dollar a month.

For a site like this, that's usually the sweet spot: nothing idles, nothing needs babysitting, and the bill is small enough that nobody reads it.

The performance scan made a suggestion

Then performance scans suggested we add a CDN for better caching and to reduce load times. Reasonable advice. Static assets served from an edge location load faster than assets served from a single region.

I thought, why not?…