Introducing Bunny Storage Edge Tier: Enter The Next-Generation Of Performance!

At bunny.net, we are on a mission to make the internet hop faster. As part of that, we aim to make lightning-fast performance simple even when dealing with truly planet-wide scale projects. In the pursuit of this mission, every now and then, we have a product or expansion announcement that genuinely leaves us excited to see it in action. Today, we have both.

We are very excited to introduce our new Edge SSD Bunny Storage tier, along with a massive global storage expansion that brings SSD-based object storage and Perma-Cache to 14 regions in the world.

Together, these take performance to the next level, and help make true planet-wide performance as easy as a few clicks to help deliver an experience for your users like never before.

Next-Generation Performance. Everywhere.

The new Bunny Storage Edge tier was made with a single goal: to help take web application performance to the next level on a true planet-scale level. We believe every user should be able to get a consistently great experience using your application for every request, no matter where they are.

To achieve this, we expanded Bunny Storage Edge tier into 6 new strategically selected datacenters for a total of 14 locations worldwide with 2 additional locations coming soon in Mumbai and Johannesburg.

Additionally, we connected each of the physical hardware nodes with 2 x 40 Gbit uplinks to ensure we are able to push content out at the highest possible rate and optimized our file access database system to further reduce the latency when accessing your files.

Benchmarking Against Traditional Object Storage Services

To see how the new Edge SSD storage tier performs, we compared it to multiple cloud providers, including the big three. To perform the benchmark, we hosted a small 250kb image of a bunny on each of the platforms. We then fired millions of requests over a period of a few hours from each of our CDN regions.

Finally, we recorded the TTFB (Time To First Byte) times for each request to get the global median and 99 percentile values.

As expected, most services offered a relatively similar level of performance. Due to laws of physics, traditional object storage offers variable response times with regular large spikes up to 1 second or longer alongside varying network conditions that can slow down performance when transferring data across the world. These spikes are what results in very unstable 99 percentile response times.

With Bunny Storage Edge and full global replication, we observed an almost 40% reduction in the median TTFB compared to Standard tier HDD storage, and up to 90% reduction compared to AWS S3. In the same way, the 99 percentile measurement dropped dramatically as well. During our testing, we saw a drastic improvement of 99 percentile TTFB up to 83% compared to both Google and AWS.

Consistency Is Key

The Bunny Storage Standard tier already offers significant benefits compared to traditional object storage in terms of the median and 99 percentile performance. However, it shares the struggles with the spinning disk issue. This is where the new Edge SSD tier really takes things to a whole new level.

With Bunny Storage Edge tier, our aim is to deliver exceptional performance for every request, no matter what. With Bunny Storage Edge, we already see a monumental improvement in the consistency of response times and we are continuing to make tweaks where possible to make it hop even faster.

Unparalleled Website Load Times

With great performance come great website load times, and the real test of the Bunny Storage Edge tier was to see it in action. For a dramatic but realistic example, we took a static website hosted on an SSD server in London and compared that to a fully replicated Edge tier SSD storage by running a website testing tool in Hong Kong.

We then measured the First Paint and Full Load Time with caching completely disabled to simulate a cache MISS scenario. With the centralized London storage, we saw the rather standard 1.7 second first paint times that will happen over such long distances.

In comparison, Bunny Storage backed origin finished the test more than 50% quicker than even the first complete HTTP request on the centralized storage. The final result was a lightning-fast load time with 154 ms to reach First Paint and a full load time of only 345 ms. Overall, the Full Load Time mark was reached almost 10X faster. The results speak for themselves.

Better Reliability With Improved CDN Routing

On top of improving the storage itself, the new Bunny Storage Edge tier brings yet another improvement to the whole Bunny Storage ecosystem: a brand new internal routing engine. Until now, we relied on manual route configuration from each of our datacenters to each storage region to configure optimal routes as needed and relied on external monitoring to discover issues. However, this did not scale with the increased network complexity.

To improve the experience of your users further, we developed a brand new routing engine for Bunny Storage that monitors each of our storage nodes directly from each of our CDN nodes and uses latency and network quality metrics to deliver great performance at all times. With the new system, Bunny Storage offers reliable performance regardless of network conditions and is able to automatically re-route traffic in case of network issues or packet loss to a specific storage region within just a few seconds.

Overall, this increased both performance as well as reliability of Bunny Storage.

Unleashing the full potential of Perma-Cache

Finally, it all ties back into Perma-Cache. When we originally introduced Perma-Cache, we had two ideas in mind: reducing origin traffic to reduce costs and pre-distributing content around the world to improve access times. As Perma-Cache grew in popularity the vision grew as well, and we saw the potential for this to become a true game-changer in assisting reliable performance on a global scale.

Even with the Standard, HDD-based servers, Perma-Cache was able to significantly reduce median response times around the world. However, it also suffered from the unavoidable problem of running into unwanted latency spikes and a lack of sufficient regions to truly make it reach its full potential. For small files, this sometimes made it a difficult recommendation.

This all changes today. With the new Edge SSD tier, Bunny Storage takes Perma-Cache to the next level to deliver lightning-fast access times for content around the world. With an average disk response times as low as <1 ms and global origin TTFB as little as 26ms, we are finally able to unleash the full potential of Perma-Cache.

Combined with the new Edge tier storage, we believe Perma-Cache becomes a game-changer for companies needing to reliably deliver critical assets quickly or smaller websites that struggle to maintain global cache on legacy CDN platforms.

Disruptive Performance Needs Disruptive Pricing

At this point, your inner skeptic might say: This is all great, but SSD storage must surely be prohibitively expensive. The good news is, we made sure that is completely wrong. We knew that if we want to take performance to the next level, the pricing should be taken to the next level as well.

We are thrilled to announce that the Bunny Storage Edge SSD tier is in fact priced lower than both AWS and Google traditional object storage solutions with at a flat rate pricing of $0.02/GB per month per region and absolutely no additional management or per request fees.

It's our mission to make next-generation global performance available to anyone and we've made sure the pricing supports that.

The future is truly global!

At bunny.net, we are truly excited about the performance implications of the new Bunny Storage Edge tier, but the work doesn't stop here.

Going forward, it is our goal to reduce the 99 percentile performance further and expand to additional regions in the world. Our long-term vision is to bring the 99 percentile TTFB below 100 milliseconds worldwide, even in developing areas.

Initially, we plan to expand into Mumbai and Johannesburg. Next, we plan to expand further in South America, the Middle East, and Africa while continuing to optimize response times.

Making the internet hop faster!

When we say it's our mission to make the internet hop faster, we really mean it. bunny.net currently powers almost 1 million websites, and our Super Bunny support team sees and helps solve performance struggles on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, poor performance caused by cache MISS is a common theme we see, but we aim to change that today. We are truly excited about the new SSD based Bunny Storage Edge tier and can't wait to see it power the next generation of web applications. It is available immediately to everyone, and we can't wait to see it in action with your projects!

Join us in supercharging the internet!

If you enjoy our vision for bunny.net and want to help us pursue relentless innovation to continue making the internet a better place, make sure to check out our careers page or simply drop us a message at hello@bunny.net. We are constantly working on exciting new projects, and we would love to see you on board.