How CDN User Requirements Are Changing

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Steve Miller-Jones: We look at a recent win for us, with someone called Katapy, who are using our compute infrastructure, our network edge to deploy their application into users for distribution and delivery as well. They're looking at things like the complexity and manageability of their backend infrastructure and how do they reduce that. They're also then looking at not just necessarily the efficiency and performance of the content distribution, which, as Will said, there's kind of a given and there's kind of an expectation. Obviously, we have to keep working on efficiency there and being good at it.

Knowing that you're good at it, but looking at the performance around things like media management as well, and then you start thinking about, by deploying that customer's application to the network environment, as well as distributing their content and delivering their content, how is that environment secure? How are we ensuring they can get to it? What's the availability and operational theory and mode for that kind of environment?

So there's a sort of shift from, we're all expected to sit there and deliver the bits day after day and be high-quality, high distribution, be close to the user, be interoperable and give the dev ops ... The CDN operational groups in our customer base are trying to use us as a toolkit and make sure we're delivering the content properly. So, really thinking about how we both do that and then provide these kinds of environments to deploy more of the application, stack it, to Thomas's point.

Edge Functions, which we launched recently, is our serverless offering. Like him for years, we've done it in the CDN in a kind of closed way. And I know in Will's case, there have been ways of programming varnish for a long time. But giving the customer the way this would bring their block of code and say, "Run that when you need to," it's opening up a different sort of set of requirements. So things like your Terraform integration that we've done for example, are things they're demanding of us.

So the real focus for the users is they expect us just to work. We have to focus on the efficiency, but at the same time, that user base is expanding their expectation of what we should do--perhaps in some cases, limiting it to "You're the bit-shifters, but I need you to inter-operate with each other."

So it's a challenging environment to bring new things into and to work out. If you bring out a new service here, is there a real benefit? What's the real use case, how do you find those customers who are really benefiting from it?

But I think it's a really exciting time. And especially during COVID, looking at how there has been growth in consumption of video and the different use cases that are coming up now, I think really are interesting for us all to grapple with.