Video: What is a DIY CDN and Why Should You Build One?

Watch Reza Naghibi's full presentation from Content Delivery Summit, Combining Your Existing CDN With a Private Content Delivery Solution, on the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Reza Naghibi: We have DIY CDN. And that's where you actually build out a caching presence. Kind of build it out for, geared towards actually serving out some sort of capacity. Not just say, "Hey, we're going to upload maybe five or 10% traffic." You actually build it out, and there might be some strategic reason you want to do that. Whether that's to have a better control of your security, better control over your delivery, maybe just have a lot of newly custom logic, or maybe even just cook offs, or just to beef up your offerings.

Lots and lots of reasons why people are building CDNs today. I would say one of the big ones is for security and for control of content. So, what are the pros and cons here?

So, obviously pros, fixed costs. Purchasing hardware, leasing lines, colocating space, that's going to cost you some sort of fixed amount of cost. Let's say maybe, like that diagram, previous slide, maybe that's going to cost you three, four, five thousand dollars a month. Yet if you were to go ahead and pay for that to CDN, that could be tens of thousands of dollars a month.

And that's the thing, that fixed cost basically gives you a certain amount of capacity. Whereas, if your traffic fluctuates, you can be paying even a lot more. You have total content security. You own the hardware. You own the software. You have basically total control over all that data flowing through the servers

Like I said, you control the software, so you have all control over what are the- we'll be saying, Varnish, what that VCL configuration is, how you format the data, how you deliver it to the clients. Another nice thing here is, once again, this blends really well with a hybrid architecture.

So, like I was saying before, one of the nice things about hybrid architecture--very low risk. So even if you were to build something like this out, and let's say that that POP gets flooded with traffic, it's not all or nothing. You can go ahead and route traffic dynamically to another location. You can scale it up or down as you see fit. You can do that day by day.

Video: How to Build a DIY CDN

Varnish Software's Reza Naghibi provides a quick tutorial on how to built a private or DIY CDN in this presentation from Content Delivery Summit 2017.

15 Feb 2018