What Private Content Delivery Is and Why it Matters

Almost all organizations rely on some form of content delivery. From websites to media to software. The transfer of data, internally and externally, over HTTP has been critical to the digital transformation of every industry. Historically, organizations turned to Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to serve these needs, however, the CDN market is consolidating as service providers of every size struggle to monetize traditional infrastructure that once was modern. 

All organizations that currently rely on CDNs need to take a very close look at what their options are if their primary CDN decides to exit the market. Due to advancements in Content Delivery Software (CDS), organizations that currently rely on traditional or modern CDNs should consider adding Private Content Delivery. First it is important to understand the reason CDNs became popular, the macro market conditions that are forcing consolidation, and the new innovations shifting control back to content owners.

Content delivery is a targeted infrastructure as a service use case

From a very high level, content delivery is a use case for delivering data utilizing underlying infrastructure. In the early days of the Internet content was delivered directly from the origin server. As websites became more popular those origin servers quickly became overwhelmed as traffic grew. This led to the rise of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that helped to ensure a good end-user experience by locating content caches (points of presence aka PoPs) as close to users as possible. This was delivered as a service-based business model, eliminating the need for organizations to make large capital investments while radically improving time to market. This happened in the late 1990s to the early 2000s when it was more difficult to secure all the elements needed for ensuring a high quality delivery experience, and almost impossible to do this on your own globally.

Content delivery initially required proprietary integrations, capital intensive approaches

From a very high level the components and function of traditional CDNs are:

In the late 90s and early 00s most of these functions were delivered via point solutions, a solution developed to solve a single problem. Sometimes these were combined in a proprietary architecture or in a series of custom built servers (black box approach). Interaction from the application perspective was a mix of standards-based and proprietary approaches.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list but is meant to demonstrate how challenging it was to secure all of these components, ensure their interoperability, manage them and then replicate this worldwide. Traditional CDN operators were and still are experts at this. However, things started to change in the mid 2000s because of virtualization, the cloud, and web services.

Virtualization, cloud and services turned the network in CDN into a liability

In early 2000, VMWare launched. They arguably started the shift from point or purpose built solutions to enabling the use of generic underlying infrastructure for software based, virtualized functions. 

Then, in 2006 Amazon launched Amazon S3, followed by a steady stream of web services launched every year since, including CloudFront, their own CDN, in 2008. Shortly after, other Hyperscalers entered the market. The “cloud” also shifted application interoperability from proprietary integrations to service oriented architectures utilizing APIs.

And, in the late 2010s containers started to overtake VMs as the preferred method of deploying services on top of generic infrastructure. This shifted service-based architectures to microservice-based architectures, increasing the momentum to running services on top of generic infrastructure.

What all of this meant is that deploying infrastructure worldwide and then deploying software on top of that infrastructure was now in the reach of anyone with a credit card. You no longer needed a team of experts to deploy generic infrastructure. 

This shifted the winners in the infrastructure as a service space to those who can quickly and continuously launch valued added services. Management, observability, large amounts of capital, and proprietary solutions were no longer the drivers of value that they once were and prices in the CDN market compressed. This is why large CDNs like Akamai rebranded to “cloud and edge” platforms, extending their value added service to higher margin offerings like security and cloud computing. For other CDNs it meant that they could no longer offer their CDN services at an acceptable profit margin so they had to exit the market. 

The new era of content delivery–select your level of control

This is a good time to take another look at the components of a traditional CDN, adding a new column that covers what is now available as bare metal, a managed service or via software.

As detailed, the hardware components of a traditional CDN are now available as bare metal or a managed service. Cloud platforms, Virtual Machine Environments and Container Platforms are a new row that encompasses orchestration of all of the services needed to rapidly deploy applications and are available as an appliance, a managed service or software. And today, all other traditional CDN components are now available as an appliance, a managed service or software.

You can now combine traditional or modern CDN services in a hybrid approach utilizing on-premises infrastructure or managed infrastructure. You can also rapidly deploy your own content delivery solution on this infrastructure using content delivery software. 

If you would like to learn more, we will be covering this topic in our upcoming webinar, What Private Content Delivery is and Why it Matters. We will focus on: 

• The options you have in on-premises and managed infrastructure. 
• What to expect from a throughput and power utilization perspective so that you can start to demonstrate progress on your sustainability goals
• Actual deployments where organization across various industries deployed private content delivery to:
  • Improve quality of service and quality of experience
  • Handle high usage peaks in a cost effective way
  • Manage applications and logic at the edge

Can't wait? Schedule a meeting with one of our experts.