Origin shield: Protecting your backends

When it comes to deploying video -- both on-demand and live -- content and delivering with a good quality of experience (QoE), there is no one-size-fits-all approach. But for almost any video streaming company, a multi-CDN strategy is needed to ensure that QoE and the ability to scale up to deliver it. 

Origin shield: Best practice in protecting multi-CDN setup?

In a recent survey on multi-CDN strategy for video delivery, analyst Dan Rayburn found that 70% of surveyed companies were considering, using or in the process of implementing origin shield to protect their multi-CDN setups. Indicative of the importance of origin shield technology, this figure also reflects how the scale of video delivery is expanding. A small percentage of respondents reported having no need at all, but nearly 20% reported considering origin shield deployment but ultimately decided against it for the time being. It’s possible that that 20% could soon change their minds as video streaming continues to grow.

Protecting single or multi-CDN origins

Sling TV’s Infrastructure Manager, Chris Lynn, joined Rayburn and Varnish recently for a webinar, in which the survey findings on multi-CDN strategies and best practices were discussed with a view to framing these issues within real-world implementation conditions. 

Chris Lynn shared that having a multi-CDN strategy with origin shield “saves” Sling and their customers because when one CDN has a bad day, which all CDNs do once in a while, they can shift to the CDNs that are performing. 

Varnish’s Guillaume Quintard added, “Origin shield is always extremely valuable whether you have one or many CDNs. If something goes wrong, the CDN itself becomes a DDoS attack on your origin, which is why you want an origin shield in the first place!”

In more complex cases, streaming media companies have learned from experience how to switch between CDNs easily, and have learned how to do so more efficiently. Whether you deploy a single CDN or rely on a multi-CDN strategy, you are always going to want to reduce load on origin to protect it from overload and safeguard performance and QoE.

A smoothly operating multi-CDN and origin shield setup, regardless of changes in viewing habits and traffic levels, should, as Sling’s Chris Lynn observed, continue to deliver as expected even at a new, higher scale. That is, in fact, the entire reason companies put these technologies in place. Even during unforeseen spikes in numbers of users viewing streaming video, such as that brought on by the recent Covid-19 crisis, robust multi-CDN strategies coupled with origin shield should have done the trick in delivering video seamlessly.

Learn more about the industry’s views on multi-CDN and origin shield technologies. Download the full multi-CDN report: