In our recent webinar with STL, From CDN to Edge Content Delivery: Quantifying the Big Opportunity, we received a lot of great questions from our audience about the nature of the telco edge, and what edge computing actually means. The edge is still a frontier space for many companies and raises a lot of question marks. Here we’ll try to dispel some of that mystery by answering some of the most common questions we get about edge computing and Varnish’s role as Edge Content Delivery Software.

A recent Strategy Analytics study, “TV’s Transformation: A Unified TV and Video Market Perspective”, predicts that consumer and advertising spend on TV and video is going to increase markedly - and that this increase, from USD 490 billion in 2017 to USD 559 billion in 2022, will happen in large part due to over-the-top services (translating, according to the research, into up to 90% of the growth).

Our recent webinar on live and OTT/on-demand video streaming brought up some frequently asked questions about using Varnish for streaming. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that streaming - and enabling reliable, high-performance streaming - is a hot topic… so we’re going to address some of these questions here.

There's a recurring discussion I get myself into, and it goes roughly like this:

- I want to stream live video, what kind of machine, and how many of them do I need?
- It depends.
- Depends on what?
- Math! Also, numbers!
- ...
- Joking, can you tell me <list of characteristics>
- <provides value>
- <performs black magic>. The answer to your question is <scarily accurate values>!

Obviously, it doesn't go "exactly" like this, but the goal of this post is going to be largely about boring math, so it sounds cooler if we say I'll be talking about black magic, right?

Let's open the grimoires and see how we can answer this sizing question!