Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

The term ‘CDN’ is pretty broad and undefined. So there is a lot of misunderstanding on what a CDN actually is, what it does, what it can be used for, what the core features are, what a CDN should not do and where it is logically placed between the physical network and the content owners.

This document used to be covered under NDA, but I thought it would be informative to share our visions about how to design a CDN technology from the ground up. I get a lot of positive feedback when I present this, so this post is to help you understand our approach on logical CDN layering and hopefully it helps you not to make the design mistakes I have seen in other CDN projects.

This is one of the core IPR parts of our VideoExchange CDN solution. It is a reflection of our +10 years experience in designing, deploying and operating CDNs. There is some pretty unique stuff in here, which has helped us deploy many CDNs in the past years, and has helped our customers enter the CDN market much faster than anyone else… Now don’t copy this, it’s protected stuff and we don’t want to spend money on lawyers. Just license it :-)

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