In a bid to make the web faster, CDN experts were keen to share what they loved and hated about CDNs.
Caching & Difficulty with Configuration
What Kyle Rush, Director for Frontend Engineering and Optimization for Hilary For America, thinks is most beneficial about CDNs is caching, because it gets the desired content to the user faster and it helps to reduce load time on the original server, avoiding traffic overload. The downsides for Kyle are difficulty with configuration. This can result in loss of control which must be avoided if possible. He wants to see ‘opinionated CDN’ with general options for caching.
Edge Delivery & Congestion
Dan Rayburn of Streaming Media likes the edge delivery that CDNs bring and the caching systems as well, as they help solve the issue of congestion and ‘slow-down.’ He also likes how companies can delegate content delivery to 3rd parties. Dan doesn’t like how it is difficult to know what each CDN provider has a specialty in. Also, he thinks there needs to be more transparency when it comes to pricing within the industry. He proposes education as the answer. He also stresses that CDN companies need to advertise their specialty more effectively, as customer confidence is key.
Proxying & Insufficient Portals
Steve Lerner, who is a senior member of the Technical Staff at eBay, thinks the edge delivery, particularly proxying, and also the TLS handshake, is a great aspect of CDNs. He also likes the advancement within the CDN industry which means CDN practices aren’t dictated by bandwidth economics. He finds the portals to be inefficient and slow and his solution is Openstack and cloud solutions.
Utility-based Platform & Lack Of Vision
According to Joshua Roza, CDN Director of Radware, the best thing about CDNs is that he feels that CDNs have ‘grown into a utility-based platform’ that has assisted internet companies by allowing them to focus on base-level offerings instead of distance, latency, and performance. The bad sides of CDNs for Joshua are their lack of vision regarding the complete architecture of a project. He feels like CDNs are too focused, and fail to see the bigger picture when it comes to network optimization, security, and cloud hosting. He sees better integration as the solution to the problem.
Internet E-commerce & High Expense
Kagan (CTO at Cedexis, co-founded the company) sees CDNs services to video delivery, internet e-commerce as well as online gaming as their key benefits, as well as allowing small companies the ability to broadcast live events which weren’t previously possible. He sees the downsides being the expense, the fact they are prone to outages, and the potential security issues some of the weak points of CDNs pose. His solution is a ‘latency-based multi-CDN solution.’ This would allow for better control and availability.
In conclusion, there are lots of great aspects of CDNs, and also a lot of negative aspects. But the leaders of the industry seem positive about the advancements that overcome the major hurdles.
