Convenience in content delivery solutions: Choose your own adventure

You hear and read a lot these days about “taking back control of your content” … but are you really in control of your content when its delivery is in someone else’s hands? Or when you can’t decide how you want to manage the content and its delivery? Anyone who delivers copious amounts of content, has unconventional needs or wants to create a solution that works to the advantage and convenience of their own requirements will recognize that it’s kind of an adventure finding the right balance.

Private or hybrid?: Content delivery options

We recently shared SFR’s story about choosing to build their own private content delivery network using Varnish. In it, we also touched upon Tesla’s choice to use Varnish to build their own global content delivery solution. Tesla’s story is a perfect example of how, upon evaluating the options, a company with very specific content delivery needs can find a solution that works for them and at their convenience.

In Tesla’s case, a private CDN solution was in order. They brought their content delivery in-house and thus totally into their own hands. But private content delivery isn’t always the answer.

A middle way: Hybrid CDN solutions

With the launch of Varnish Extend, a pre-packaged content delivery software layer, bundling the Varnish Plus software suite and cloud-based global traffic management from Varnish partner, Cedexis, a hybrid CDN was born. Based on flexibility and convenience, Varnish Extend puts control back into a company’s hands to deliver content according to their own needs.

With a mix of commercial CDN and private cache servers/CDN architectures (Facebook and Netflix are prime examples of the hybrid content delivery approach), regional broadcasters and media publishers, for example, can benefit from leveraging caching nodes in their local market for VoD and live streaming. Varnish Extend allows for improvements in content delivery performance while global traffic management ensures that content is delivered from the fastest, closest server, which helps to offload some of the costs associated with commercial CDNs. There are a lot of different things you can do with a hybrid content delivery strategy: this is the whole point. You’re not locked into a one-size-fits-all, generic solution. Instead, you have the freedom and convenience of setting up a solution that works for you.

In short, Varnish Extend helps untie your hands in managing and delivering traffic volumes. In areas of performance, cost, scale, and security, choosing your own content delivery solution - hybrid or private - ultimately meets your needs but also meets the needs and demands of your end users/consumers.

If you are ready to learn more, watch our joint Varnish-Cedexis on-demand webinar on Varnish Extend to learn how you can use it to build your own private or hybrid CDN.

Photo (c) 2010 Megan Hansen used under Creative Commons license.