How to Choose a Virtual CDN for Live Events
Learn more about virtual CDNs at the next Content Delivery Summit.
See complete videos and other highlights from Content Delivery Summit on Streaming Media's YouTube channel.
Read the complete transcript of this video:
Jim Brickmeier: When choosing a virtual CDN for live events, there are lots of options out there, in terms of if you have your own network versus if you don't. If you have your own network, there's there's software out there that you can use that's fully virtualized and allows you to spin up capacity as needed to support live events and spin it back down when you don't need it. I think that's the key advantage of some of the virtualized technologies and some of the orchestration capabilities of things like Kubernetes and so on, that you can be responsive to demand and try to be as cost-effective as possible.
I think that is one of the challenges: When you don't have your own network, if you're running gobs of live traffic, the question becomes, how do you do it cost-effectively, especially if you're using unicast and not a multicast delivery mechanism. That's still something that requires discussion to understand the specific application and how many people you're hitting, and what regions and all of those kinds of things.
But I think there are quite a few options out there, and a lot of times these days, we see people asking about hybrid kinds of scenarios, where they have some fixed capacity on their own networks, and they want to be able to burst capacity into the cloud to support spikes in the case that, as an example, you've got World Cup soccer games. If you've got the Olympics coming and they don't want to build out a full capacity for those spikes, they just build out capacity for their standard kinds of traffic load, and then look to expand capacity beyond that by using either the same, the same CDN solution hosted in a public cloud environment or by doing some CDN selection and looking at multiple CDNs to go ahead and carry traffic above and beyond the private network.
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