CDN
Improving our CDN: Four new POP locations – and more on the way
Good coverage of our Content Delivery Network (CDN) is key to our customers. The more Points of Presence (PoPs) our CDN has, the better you will be able to serve your end users. As part of our continuous CDN upgrade program, I’m proud to announce that we have opened a further four new PoP locations during the last couple of months.
We have prioritized the following strategic locations:
LeaseWeb introduces third generation CDN: multi carrier rack
As a CDN operator, we are continually pioneering new technologies in order to improve performance and lower our cost base.
In this context, we have launched several generations of CDN PoPs. The first generation connected the CDN servers to several carriers via LeaseWeb’s routers. The router ports found the best and fastest route available. In September 2014, we introduced a second generation of PoPs, which complemented the first. The second generation connected the CDN directly to one carrier. This saves costs because the LeaseWeb routers are no longer in between. Unfortunately, in this scenario there is no redundancy advantage since we connected to one carrier only. So even though the CDN PoPs complemented our platform and performed well, they did not allow us to grow at the pace we needed to.
Finally, we can now proudly present our third generation multi-carrier PoP combining the best of both worlds. Using smart, pioneering SDN technologies that we developed in-house, we are exploiting switches that are actually performing routing tasks without the need of using expensive routers.
The multi-carrier PoP routes traffic to either the LeaseWeb network infrastructure (from which we use the peering destinations) or directly to a variety of other carriers available according to their performance. This way, the multi-carrier rack boosts content speed delivery to end users, while at the same time reducing infrastructure and network costs to the bone.
Furthermore, the cherry on top of the cake is that the new multi-carrier PoPs will host our dynamic Anycast DNS platform. The combination of both actions shows improvement by a factor 3 of our content delivery performance both in throughput and latency.
The multi-carrier rack will first be deployed in Miami this August. The rest of the CDN platform will be fully migrated in the following months. By the end of the year, all of LeaseWeb’s customers worldwide will be able to reap the benefits and get more speed and offload than ever before!
Setting up the LeaseWeb CDN on Magento
Magento
® is one of today’s most popular e-commerce platforms and widely used for automating online stores. Integrating this open-source content management system with the LeaseWeb CDN can really optimize performance of your e-commerce web site and in this blog we describe what you need to do to set it up quickly and easily.
A couple of assumptions before we get started:
- Magento® is installed on the origin server.
- An “Origin” that points to your Magento® installation is already defined within your LeaseWeb CDN control panel.
LeaseWeb CDN First Anniversary: We’ve only just begun!
What a year! Successfully launching a brand new CDN service from scratch in such a competitive environment has been a tremendous achievement. And now the LeaseWeb CDN team is looking forward to presenting you with yet more new features next year as we continuously improve it. We’re really excited to see how much we’ve accomplished in such a short period of time and it’s been a thrilling experience to be part the team that made it happen.
Here are just a few of the things we’ve achieved:
Sneaky P2P tactics with video delivery
Hello LeaseWeb Blog readers, Lawton Cheney here, writing to you this month about the debatable practice of peer-delivery (P2P) distribution applications in the online video streaming market.
Yes, I said peer-to-peer. And no, we are not going to “party like it’s 1999” with Napster. What we have for a quick discussion here, is an Internet distribution dynamic that we have seen on the Internet before, but with a twist as seen today in the VOD (video on demand) and OTT (over-the-top streaming) marketplaces. If Internet technology and/or a little bit of ethical business practice are things you like to read about – please carry on.
One trend that we are noticing (one that I find questionable practice) in the streaming market is that some platforms are implementing a “peer-to-peer” solution whereby the end-user (i.e. the end-user’s computer, tablet, etc., and upload link to the Internet) is being utilized by some video players to serve and deliver to other end-user customers located within close geographical proximity of the initial end-user.
Why you need a cookie-less domain
Any website needs a cookie-less domain. This (sub)domain is typically called “static”. It is used to serve Javascript, CSS, images and other static content. The reason for static content to be on a cookie-less domain is that it makes the content load faster. This argument may be counter intuitive, since cookies are small and you would not expect them to have a significant impact. But let me try to explain.
NoSQL in CDN
Whenever we build a new CDN SuperPoP or improve the infrastructure in another way, we constantly think about how to keep our systems scalable. You see, we did not just ‘create a CDN’. We created a CDN that can compete with the big players in the market. Therefore, we built it with big numbers on our mind. We have reserved half a Terabit of capacity for streaming, using about 1500 SSDs, each with half a Terabyte of capacity. With this setup, we can handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second. But this is where things get a little complicated. How do we exactly keep track of who is doing what on our CDN nodes?
How we built SuperPoPs for our next generation CDN
Earlier this week, we announced the first expansion of our CDN infrastructure. When we launched LeaseWeb CDN back in June, we were serving 18 Gbps of data traffic. Since then, we have attracted new customers, pushing bandwidth usage to 150 Gbps. To support this growth, we had to significantly expand our infrastructure using SuperPoPs. Now, the word SuperPoP might sound nice, but what does it actually mean? What makes these PoPs so “Super”?
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