I was involved with the CDN process at YouTube when we used an external service for popular videos and later when we moved to an in-house built system.
The short summary is unless you're really big and have a dedicated team (who's done this before) to do *just* the CDN and Geo parts you're going to spend a lot more time and money on simply providing a decent footprint around the world. At anything smaller than the, "really huge" scale it's guaranteed to cost you way more to do it yourself than it will to pay even the most expensive providers out there. Also, they'll do a better job than you waill. If you do it yourself you're going to get #2 wrong a *lot*. Google has some of the best GeoIP in the world and we still had to spend a lot of time tuning this part since getting the location wrong really sucked for streaming video in ways it didn't for, say, thumbnails. Now if you need *features* that aren't provided by some of the other CDNs out there (like SSL endpoints) a less expensive middle ground might be EC2 with RT53 DNS. It's still going to be a lot more work than just handing it all off to someone else. In the end, you be measuring the relevant metrics before and after you experiment and se if it actually makes a sufficient improvement for your users. Joe On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Jeremy Charles <[email protected]> wrote: > I do agree with you and the others who have offered comments to the effect > of it not being worth doing. > > In order to illustrate why it's not worthwhile for us to do this, I need > to investigate how I would go about doing it. If I say it's not worth > doing but I have no clue what it involves, my opinion won't hold any water. > I need to show that I have an understanding of what it would take *before* > I can make a compelling argument that it's not worth doing. (Or maybe I'll > be surprised and find that there is a reasonable and worthwhile way to do > it...) > > So far, I have come up with these approaches today: > > 1) Buy IPv4 and IPv6 blocks to use for our own CDN and then upgrade my > Internet feeds and equipment to advertise these from all of the places > where we host our content. > > 2) Use geolocation information to build views in BIND that resolve the > relevant domain names to the different servers that provide the content, > based on perceived location. > > I feel that I've been able to show why #1 doesn't make financial sense and > #2 involves lots of potential inaccuracy and unintended consequences (hint: > You may be surprised as to whether clients in Dubai should be sent to my > Wisconsin headquarters or my Amsterdam colo). > > Are there other approaches that I should also be looking at and evaluating? > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Tracy Reed [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2012 1:37 PM > To: Jeremy Charles > Cc: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [lopsa-discuss] Build my own CDN > > On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 07:57:35AM PST, Jeremy Charles spake thusly: > > I’ve been asked to look in to what it would take for my employer to > build its > > own content delivery network hosted on our own hardware at various > physical > > locations around the world (all two of them, soon to be four). The > intent is > > to host our own content, not anybody else’s. > > I highly recommend looking into one of the existing federated CDNs which > you > can join instead of your own CDN. They provide the software and handle > accounting etc. and you can then use your spare storage/bandwidth to make > some > money utilizing your excess capacity. > > http://onapp.com/cdn/ is the one I am familiar with. > > -- > Tracy Reed > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ >
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