Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

2002. Since I already had a background in distributed delivery, I dived deeper into the internet infrastructure, to come up with a smart distributed solution for mass-scale content delivery.

It involved a simple number of technologies I already had developed in operational or rudimentary form. Parallelized delivery servers as core and edge servers. A smart asset and live relay replication mechanism. A smart geo load balancing application. Some log processing scripts.

Technical stuff. But why and how does this work? Let’s compare this with Logistics.

Mail

Suppose that you have to drive to the capital of your state to fetch your mail. Every day at 8AM. What would happen?

1. Your driveway is empty. Just your car. (Last mile)
2. All the neighbours drive off their driveway on the street. Okay. (Local metro)
3. It gets crowded when your neighborhood wants to access the city ring. Hmmm. (City metro).
4. The highway is jammed. Traffic jam. (ISP backbones).
5. You will never reach the capital. You will never be able to get your mail. (Internet Exchange).

Logistics

That is why we have couriers, trucks, parcel services and logistics companies.

1. Your mail is collected on a central hub. (I call this the OVERLAY CDN).
2. All mail for your region is shipped to a regional hub. (This is your ISP’s CDN).
3. All mail is then filtered per postal code and sent to the local post office (The ISP’s edge server).
4. The mailman or courier brings the mail to your door. (Home broadband connection).

The concept is hundreds years old. It is extremely efficient. It offloads the countries infrastructure and speeds up delivery. Replace mail by video. Replace couriers by a CDN.

What we design and develop is the digital version of the good old postal services. We enable ISP’s to setup digital distribution logistics platforms. And we enable content owners to overlay these platforms with their own platforms. Cool eh? :-)