Wednesday, January 13, 2016 at 8:56AM With 1.49 billion monthly active users, operating at Facebook scale is far from trivial. Facebook's new live video streaming services present a fascinating use case for designing streaming service in global distribution and massive scale.
Monday, July 23, 2012 at 9:16AM 
CDNs (content delivery networks) are the secret shadow super powers behind the web and Dan Rayburn at streamingmedia.com is the go to investigative reporter for quality information on CDNs. Every year Dan has a Content Delivery Summit on all things CDN and those videos are now available. Dan also gives a kind of state of the industry talk where he does something wonderful, he gives real numbers and prices. Dan really knows his stuff and is an excellent speaker, so watch the video, but here’s my gloss on the state of the CDN so far this year:
Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 9:14AM Update: as of the end of Q2 2011, Akamai had 95,811 servers deployed globally.
Akamai is the CDN to the stars. It claims to deliver between 15 and 30 percent of all Web traffic, with major customers like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the US military. Traditionally quite secretive, we get a peek behind the curtain in this paper: The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications by Erik Nygren, Ramesh Sitaraman, and Jennifer Sun.
Comprising more than 61,000 servers located across nearly 1,000 networks in 70 countries worldwide, the Akamai platform delivers hundreds of billions of Internet interactions daily, helping thousands of enterprises boost the performance and reliability of their Internet applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the components and capabilities of this large-scale distributed computing platform, and offer some insight into its architecture, design principles, operation, and management.
Delivering applications over the Internet is a bit like living in the Wild West, there are problems: Peering point congestion, Inefficient communications protocols, Inefficient routing protocols, Unreliable networks, Scalability, Application limitations and a slow rate of change adoption. A CDN is the White Hat trying to remove these obstacles for enterprise customers. They do this by creating a delivery network that is a virtual network over the existing Internet. The paper goes on to explain how they make this happen using edge networks and a sophisticated software infrastructure. With such a powerful underlying platform, Akamai is clearly Google-like in their ability to deliver products few others can hope to match.
Detailed and clearly written, it's well worth a read.
Monday, July 12, 2010 at 8:32AM Like many other media content providers, libraries and museums are increasingly moving their content onto the Web. While the move itself is no easy process (with digitization, web development, and training costs), being able to successfully deliver content to a wide audience is an ongoing concern, particularly for large libraries.
Much of the concern is financial, as most libraries do not have the internal budget or outside investors that for-profit businesses enjoy. Even large university libraries will face serious budget constraints that even other university departments, such as science and technology would not face.
Creating a scalable infrastructure and also distributing a large digital collection that can handle multiple requests, requires planning that many librarians have not even imagined. They must stop thinking in terms of "one-item-per-customer" and start thinking in terms of numerous users accessing the same information simultaneously.
Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 8:36AM Replicating content across a geographically distributed set of servers and redirecting clients to the closest server in terms of latency has emerged as a common paradigm for improving client performance. In this paper, we analyze latencies measured from servers in Google’s content distribution network (CDN) to clients all across the Internet to study the effectiveness of latency-based server selection. Our main result is that redirecting every client to the server with least latency does not suffice to optimize client latencies. First, even though most clients are served by a geographically nearby CDN node, a sizeable fraction of clients experience latencies several tens of milliseconds higher than other clients in the same region. Second, we find that queueing delays often override the benefits of a client interacting with a nearby server.
To help the administrators of Google’s CDN cope with these problems, we have built a system called WhyHigh. First, WhyHigh measures client latencies across all nodes in the CDN and correlates measurements to identify the prefixes affected by inflated latencies. Second, since clients in several thousand prefixes have poor latencies, WhyHigh prioritizes problems based on the impact that solving them would have, e.g., by identifying either an AS path common to several inflated prefixes or a CDN node where path inflation is widespread. Finally, WhyHigh diagnoses the causes for inflated latencies using active measurements such as traceroutes and pings, in combination with datasets such as BGP paths and flow records. Typical causes discovered include lack of peering, routing misconfigurations, and side-effects of traffic engineering. We have used WhyHigh to diagnose several instances of inflated latencies, and our efforts over the course of a year have significantly helped improve the performance offered to clients by Google’s CDN.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 3:31PM Update 10: The Value of CDNs by Mike Axelrod of Google. Google implements a distributed content cache from within large ISPs. This allows them to serve content from the edge of the network and save bandwidth on the ISPs backbone. Update 9: Just Jump: Start using Clouds and CDNs. Bob Buffone gives a really nice and practical tutorial of how to use CloudFront as your CDN. Update 8: Akamai’s Services Become Affordable for Anyone! Blazing Web Site Performance by Distribution Cloud. Distribution Cloud starts at $150 per month for access to the best content distribution network in the world and the leader of Content Distribution Networks. Update 7: Where Amazon’s Data Centers Are Located, Expanding the Cloud: Amazon CloudFront. Why Amazon's CDN Offering Is No Threat To Akamai, Limelight or CDN Pricing. Amazon has launched their CDN with "“low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.” The perfect relationship for many. The majority of the locations are in North America, but some are in Europe and Asia. Update 6: Amazon Launching New Content Delivery Network: No Threat To Major CDNs, Yet. All the Amazon will kill all other CDNs is a bit overblown. As usual Dan Rayburn sets us straight: The offering won't support streaming, live broadcasting, or provide many of the other products and services that video content owners need...the real story here is that Amazon is going to offer a high performance method of distributing content with low latency and high data transfer rates. Update 5: When It Comes To Content Delivery Networks, What Is The "Edge"?. Dan Rayburn is on edge about the misuse of the term edge: closest location to the user does not guarantee quality, often content is not delivered from the closest location, all content is not replicated at every "edge" location. Lots of other essential information. Update 4: David Cancel runs a great test to see if you should be Using Amazon S3 as a CDN?. Conclusion: "CacheFly performed the best but only slightly better than EdgeCast. The S3 option was the worst with the Nginx/DIY option performing just over 100 ms faster." Also take look at Part 2 - Cacheability? Update 3: Mr. Rayburn takes A Detailed Look At Akamai's Application Delivery Product . They create a "bi-nodal overlay network" where users and servers are always within 5 to 10 milliseconds of each other. Your data center hosted app can't compete. The problem is that people (that is, me) can understand the data center model. I don't yet understand how applications as a CDN will work. Update 2: Dan Rayburn starts an interesting series of articles on Highlights Of My Day In Cambridge With Akamai. Akamai is moving strong into the application distribution business. That would make an interesting cloud alternative.. Update: Streamingmedia links to new CDN DF Splash that specializes in instant-on TV-quality video streaming. A question was raised on the forum asking for a CDN recommendation. As usual there are no definitive answers, but here are three useful articles that may help your deliberations.
Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 3:05AM DataDirect Networks (www.ddn.com) is searching for beta testers for our exciting new object-based clustered storage system. Does this sound like you? * Need to store millions to hundreds of billions of files * Want to use one big file system but can't because no single file system scales big enough * Running out of inodes * Have to constantly tweak file systems to perform better * Need to replicate content to more than one data center across geographies * Have thumbnail images or other small files that wreak havoc on your file and storage systems * Constantly tweaking and engineering around performance and scalability limits * No storage system delivers enough IOPS to serve your content * Spend time load balancing the storage environment * Want a single, simple way to manage all this data If this sounds like you, please contact me at jgoldstein@ddn.com. DataDirect Networks is a 10-year old, well-established storage systems company specializing in Extreme Storage environments. We've deployed both the largest and the fastest storage/file systems on the planet - currently running at over 250GB/s. Our upcoming product is going to change the way storage is deployed for scalable web content and we're seeking testers who can throw their most challenging problems at our new system. It's time for something better and we're going to deliver it.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 7:01PM We build web applications…and there are plenty of them around. Now, if we hit the jackpot and our application becomes very popular, traffic goes up, and our servers are brought down by the hordes of people coming to our website. What do we do in that situation? Of course, I am not talking here about the kind of traffic Digg, Yahoo Buzz or other social media sites can bring to a website, which is temporary overnight traffic, or a website which uses cloud computing like Amazon EC2 service, MediaTemple Grid Service or Mosso Hosting Cloud service. I am talking about traffic that consistently increases over time as the service achieves success. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plentyoffish.com, Linkedin.com, Youtube.com and others are examples of services which have constant high traffic. Knowing that users want speed from their applications, these services will always use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver that speed. What is a Content Delivery Network? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers. Read the entire article about Content Delivery Networks (CDN) list of providers at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 12:48AM Several months ago I attended a Joyent presentation where the spokesman hinted that Joyent had the chops to support a one billion page per month Facebook Ruby on Rails application. Even under a few seconds of merciless grilling he would not give up the name of the application. Now we have the big reveal: it was LinkedIn's Bumper Sticker app. For those not currently sticking things on bumps, Bumper Sticker is quite surprisingly a viral media sharing application that allows users to express their individuality by sticking small virtual stickers on Facebook profiles. At the time I was quite curious how Joyent's cloud approach could be leveraged for this kind of app. Now that they've released a few details, we get to find out.
Site: http://www.Facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2427603417
Monday, May 19, 2008 at 7:23PM Hi, I was wondering if I could borrow the collective minds of you all to draw up a list to the CDN's that you'd use/do use in the UK. If they're outside the UK but have decent support then also include. The service must be cheap and not require a huge setup fee, it's really only for a small time business; it shares video & high-res pics so mass cheap storage is a must and wondered whether you guys had any ideas, also costs? Mass storage isn't cheap in the UK compared to the states, for example, unless I go colo but as I say, it's a small setup but happens to require a fair bit of space. Would S3 be a good starting point? What is the service like? I hear mixed reviews about it. Many thanks, Jim
