This document provides notes from a presentation on content delivery networks (CDNs). It discusses key internet trends driving growth in CDN usage, including the rise of cloud services, online video, mobile devices, and e-commerce in Asia. The presentation covers how CDNs help deliver content to users more quickly and reliably by caching it at network edges. It also describes different CDN models like traditional CDNs, enterprise CDNs, and transparent caching operated by internet service providers. The document concludes by discussing future directions for CDNs, such as integrating more with cloud platforms, establishing standards, and providing more personalized content delivery.

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Presentation Notes
Paul Southern, Pasoco Pte Ltd
Paul Southern
Speaker:
Content Manager:
Title of presentation:
Name of Event:
Location of Event:
Presentation date/time:
Length of presentation
Audience:
Thursday 15 August 2013, 4-530pm
60 (plus Q&A)
IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Singapore Chapter
Franklin at Level 11, Connexis South Tower, 1 Fusionopolis Way,
Singapore 138632
CDN
Public, non NDA. A*Star, NUS. IEEE members
Press Announcement: https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/meeting_view/list_meeting/19605
Host: Guo Huaqun (I2R)

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Paul Southern
• 25 years in IT, telco, media and digital
experiences
• Large MNCs and startups
• Mature and emerging markets on 6 continents
• IPTV/OTT, cloud, CDN, Asianization, UX
• Sales, strategy, CTO, business development,
development, support, Professional Services,
consulting, founder
• CTO APACcache

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Internet megatrends
Drivers for CDN
Enterprise CDN
Transparent caching
Future of CDN

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Internet megatrends

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Internet megatrends 1
• Cloud: 1/3 of all data will live in the cloud by
20201, 2/3 of all workloads2
• Media: More than 90% of Internet traffic will
be video by 20151
• Mobile: 50 billion / 10:1 devices per internet
user by 20202
• Security: Cyber attacks cost companies up to
$100,000/min3
Sources: 1-Cisco, 2-Akamai 3-McAfee, all c/o Akamai

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Internet megatrends 2
• 45% of world’s internet users in Asia1
• 11m new users every month1
• 64% of Asians purchased online2
• $1T, +21% global eCommerce revenue in 20122
• 69% of Asians watch internet video1
• 2X India online video consumption 2011-20133
Sources: 1-We are social, Oct. 2012, 2-eMarketer, Feb. 2013, 3-Comscore,
May 2013, all c/o Akamai

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Media explosion
• Media traffic Tbps
– 2006 = 1
– 2009 = 2.6
– 2012 = 10
– 2015 est = 50
– 2020 est = hundreds
Sources: Akamai

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Internet traffic: NA, Asiapac
Sources: Sandvine

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Enterprise architecture
• Old
– Email access & corporate apps, using corporate PC
– Static website for information
• New
– Datacenter & dynamic website
– Corporate apps
– Branches & corporate WAN
– Intranet & VPNs
– Cloud providers (IaaS/PaaS, private/public)
– SaaS/App providers (Salesforce, Office365, etc)
– Business partners, esp SCM, CAD/CAM, media

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Drivers for CDN

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Drivers for CDN
• The internet – topology, investment, ownership
• Users’ expectations

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℗
Driver #1 – The internet
• The internet is a collection of nodes and links
– National operators
– Transnational operators
– Peering points & bottlenecks
– Access control
• Commercial considerations

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℗
Delivering internet content
• Backends (eg: CMS) to web-servers to NICs to the
internet
• Multiple operators & bandwidth costs
• Last mile
• Last meter

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Southeast Asia

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Example: Changi Cable Landing Station
• Station Name: Changi Cable Landing Station, or Changi CLS
• Station Owner: Singtel
• Available Backhaul Providers: Singtel, Tata, Pacnet, etc.
• Submarine Cable Systems:
– AAG
– APCN
– EAC
– TIC (Tata Indicom Cable)
– TGN-IA
– TIS (Thailand-Indonesia-Singapore)
– MIC-1 (Moratelindo International Cable-system One)

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CDN math for 2020
• Demand (at the edge)
– 1.5B Primetime Viewers x 7 Mbps = 10,000 Tbps
– 400M Lines x 25 Mbps = 10,000 Tbps
• Supply (at the core)
– 100 Major Networks X 5 Tbps = 500 Tbps
• 500/10,000 = only 5% of demand served !
Source: Akamai, Jan 2013

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Driver #2 – Users’ expectations
• Users’ expectations OR brands’ offerings ?
• Latency – page load, video choke, etc…

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Latency: the business impact
• A 0.1sec increase in loading time…
= a 1% decrease in sales. (1% of Amazon’s 2012
sales = $480M)1
• A 0.5sec increase in loading time…
= a 20% decrease in traffic and ad revenues.2
• After 3sec wait…
57% of users give up, of which 80% never come
back.3
Sources: 1-Amazon c/o Ericsson, 2-Google c/o Ericsson, 2-Edgecast

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CDN beginnings
• Pre-CDN technologies for websites: server farms,
hierarchical caching, caching proxies.
• Akamai (ex MIT) accelerates on-demand
“Breaking News” video.
• In parallel:
– Big ISPs & Hosters build their own CDNs.
– CDN network operators enter market.
• Cloud provider deploy CDN (and vice versa).

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CDN today
• [ BTW, our browsers cache ]
• Proprietary CDNs
– Google: YouTube, Apple: iTunes , etc…
• Multi-tenant CDNs for enterprise
– Objects, downloads, video
– AJAX/JQuery CDNs (hosters)
– Hybrid / partnerships per-country
• Other CDNs
– Mobile CDNs
– Aware CDNs, eg: location, device, language
• Transcode, ad-serve

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Enterprise CDN

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Enterprise CDN
• Purpose:
– Enterprise offers users a better experience
• Faster page-loads, response times
• Video-quality
• Players:
– Enterprise = buyer
– CDN operator = seller (nodes and networks)
– ISPs = partner of CDN operator

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Objects, Static & dynamic
• Static websites
– Cached objects
– Images
– Large files (eg: EXE’s, updates)
• Dynamic websites
– Not cached per se
– Route accelerated
– Compute accelerated

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Traditional CDN
• Traditional CDN (static, DSA)
– Spread load, handle surge/spike/route failure
– UX – faster loading / playing
– Subcontract delivery
– Essential for upsell, paid/premium content
• Enabled by:
– Presence at edges
– Secret sauce, capture and redirect
– On-demand propagation
– Ability to scale, speed, per-geo, etc…
– Price (versus competitors)
– Enterprise must balance ROI

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CDN’d objects
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/
130620233110-singapore-haze-6-horizontal-gallery.jpg
17KB image
evernote.s3.amazonaws.com
xxxx.ak.fbcdn.net

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CDN’d objects

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Traditional CDN – how it works
• Content delivery component
– Origin server and a set of edge servers (surrogates) to replicate
content
• Content distribution component
– Moves content from the origin to edge servers and ensures
consistency
• Request-routing component
– Direct user requests to edge servers
– Interact with the distribution component to keep an up-to-date
view of content
• Accounting component
– Maintains logs of client accesses and records usage of the
servers
– Assists in traffic reporting and usage-based billing

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ChinaCache example
Government E-Commerce
Media
Finance
Games
ICPs
ISPs
Enterprises

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Video
• Live vs On-demand
– Live = in realtime, concurrent, multicast
– On-demand = not realtime, unicast
• Big live events
– Inaugurations, weddings, sport events, chats
• Obama 2010 on CNN.com: 1.3m
• Royal wedding 2011 on Akamai: 2.9m + Others
• On-demand
– Esp viral video, breaking news

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Plugins

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Dynamic site acceleration (DSA)
• Oftentimes webpages are compiled (ie: html generated) when a
user does something, eg: next.
• DSA doesn’t work well for
– Highly volatile data & extreme accuracy needed, eg: seat availability
– Compute
– Search
• DSA accomplished by
– TCP optimization
– Route optimization
– Connection management
– On-the-fly compression
– SSL offload
– Pre-fetching

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Transparent caching

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The ISP’s dilemma #1b

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The ISP’s dilemma #1a

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The ISP’s dilemma #1c

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Transparent caching
• Purpose:
– ISP to reduce cost of international bandwidth
• Players:
– Enterprise = not involved
– CDN operator = seller (nodes)
– ISPs = buyer

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TC – performance

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TC – performance

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TC – What matters
• Locked-in matters: commodity versus proprietary
hardware (and software)
• Origins matter: cache the expensive origins
• All operators matter: wholesale transparent cache
(TCaaS)
• Meetme’s matter: cloud and CDN
• Rackspace matters: plethora of private CDNs
• Measurement matters: P2P will always be big

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Future of CDN

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CDN vs Cloud
• Cloud centralized & CDN at edge
– Complementary
– CDNs doing cloud, Clouds doing CDN
– Eg: Microsoft Azure CDN, Amazon AWS (S3, EC2,
Cloudfront)
• Many origins in cloud, eg: in AWS
– Especially good for large object, eg: AWS S3
• ChinaCache’s Orca
– Management systems in cloud (prov, billing, mtc)
– Objects from origins moved to cloud (new origin) then
cached

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Future of CDN
• CDN standards / federated CDNs
• Off-the-shelf application-specific mini-CDNs, eg:
– Learning environments with interactive
• Similar to Go To Meeting, Webex
– Digital signage
– CSN / Content Service Netwokr
• Partnerships
– CDN operator + Cloud / Carrier / Hoster
• Proprietary networks
– Differentiation, plugins

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Future of CDN
• Service-Oriented Architecture
– Content management based on users’ preferences
– Personalization based on data mining
– Convergence with big-data systems
• Edge compute & DSA
– Scripts, animations, DHTML, XML
– IOT / internet of things

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Thank you
Questions?
paul@pasoco.biz