One of the many amazing things about GCP's External Global Load Balancers is that you can enable worldwide edge CDN (Content Delivery Network) caching and even automatic compression for any backend with a single checkbox via GCP's Cloud CDN. Simply by checking "Enable Cloud CDN" for a given backend, all traffic served from that backend is instantly cached at the edge around the world using Google's global POP network. This means that multiple requests for a given file are satisfied by caches geographically proximate to each user, rather than having to transit across the world back to the original backend. Even better, CDN enables automatic compression, achieving typical 60-85% compression ratios for common highly compressible formats like JSON and CSS. In our case, since enabling Cloud CDN for data.gdeltproject.org, we're seeing a 65-74% cache hit rate average, meaning that nearly three quarters of the requests for files are being served at the edge directly from cache instead of having to globally transit to the underlying GCS backend origin.