The CDN is evolving: Create your own hybrid CDN

The CDN has become a standard part of web content delivery, designed to make performance more reliable and scalable. For much of the life of the web, a lot of this content has been static and didn’t face big delivery challenges. As the web has grown and content of all types, particularly video, has proliferated, this has changed, as have the challenges.

The need for content delivery acceleration, resilience and the ability to reach a global audience with massive amounts of content has exploded. Content delivery is all about bandwidth, traffic routing and the type of content you’re trying to deliver: the traditional CDN met the basic needs of predictability and resilience, but the boom in video content being delivered across devices to a global footprint has created new challenges.

Our recent CDN report, Trends in CDN use, which surveyed more than 600 technology leaders in the media/publishing, streaming, telco and retail sectors, offered insights into some of these challenges and developing trends, such as:

• The need for more control, coverage, cost savings, better performance, and scalability
• Video as the most challenging and fastest-growing CDN use case
• Hybrid CDNs match the need for flexibility
• Building your own CDN is faster and easier than ever, and enables unprecedented customization possibilities
  
  

To find out more about what the CDN insight survey revealed, download the report: 

Build your own CDN: Have it all your way

Building your own CDN used to be a pie-in-the-sky dream in that it could be time consuming and expensive, requiring extensive in-house expertise both to build and maintain. But all of that has changed. Our survey showed that upwards of 92% of respondents had built or were working on building their own CDN solutions, and they chose to do so not only because it has never been easier but also because it solves the challenges highlighted above — control, coverage, performance, cost savings, scalability. Choosing a hybrid self-designed CDN solution resolved some of these issues and gave these companies the freedom to deliver content from the closest points to end users possible.

We recently hosted a webinar, How to Build Your Own CDN in Under 1 Hour with Varnish Software, to illustrate exactly how easy it can be to build a CDN yourself in as little as one hour. We invite you to take a look.