why use multicdn cedexis
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© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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BEST PRACTICES:
Part of the Cedexis CDN Maturity Series
In a world where outages are the norm, fast and reliable applications need complete coverage.
Making the Case for Multi-CDN Delivery
© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This eBook will showcase real world use cases to
demonstrate the benefits of multi-CDN delivery for
companies focused on optimizing web performance.
Cedexis is dedicated to developing multi-CDN strategies
and solutions for content and application delivery. Our
clients are global retail, media, and technology companies
that leverage Cedexis’ expertise and tools—creating the
best possible performance for their users worldwide.
Cedexis is constantly measuring real-time performance
across all major clouds and CDNs as they are seen by
billions of end users behind over 38,000 ISP networks in
every country in the world.
In this eBook, we share our perspective on how a multi-
CDN strategy can optimize performance of content
and application delivery platforms, based on real results
produced for our clients.
© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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THE X SECOND RULE:Engaging with Audience’s Ever Increasing Expectation
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the ‘eight-second rule’ – meaning users would abandon sites taking longer than 8 seconds to download – get slashed to four seconds and then two.1
1“Maximizing Audience Engagement” Akamai, January 2015
Audiences have always dropped off when content delivery is slow.
Studies of ecommerce and video have proven that the longer it takes
for the screen to completely render, the more people close the browser
and move on to another enterprise.
We can’t call it “The 8 Second Rule” anymore. It keeps changing. Let’s call it “The X Second Rule.”
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FEELING ABANDONED: VIDEO VIEWERSHIPVideos are a great proof point of viewer abandonment, offering significant metrics.
We don’t need to restate the obvious. Information from Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Mozilla prove over and over that Internet users stick with high performance sites and abandon slow sites.
Metric Outcome
eCommerce Shopping cart performance More completed purchases
Content Quicker load timesMore reads, more views, more social shares
Applications Faster downloadsMore installs, more use, more clients
Every Internet business model has proven case studies of how performance increases business goals.
Business Benefits of CDNs
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THE CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK: RAISING THE BAR
With even small delays, lasting only 1% of the total length of the video, viewers watched 5% less video.2
2“Maximizing Audience Engagement” Akamai, January 2015
DevOps needs to find ways to provide even more reliable, faster,
application delivery.
One massive innovation is the content delivery network (CDN). These
services store the more static assets in high-performance data centers
that are strategically located to get assets to the end client as speedily
as possible.
These days, any service serious about delivering high quality to
large audiences must either utilize a CDN service or implement its
own solution. A CDN caches the most
requested objects of an
application closer to the client.
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THE CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK: NOBODY’S PERFECT
Nobody is perfect, and no one is perfect for everyone. CDNs strive for perfect uptime,
but they can’t accomplish it. In addition, different
geographic regions are better served by one CDN
or another.
• Outages (which do happen) will damage
audience response.
• The service starts gaining popularity in a
region that the CDN does not have great
performance.
• The CDN becomes a critical part of the
business, and the business would like to have
some leverage to negotiate terms.
As audience expectations increase and as services achieve a global reach, relying on one CDN creates weaknesses.
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DISTRIBUTE RESPONSIBILITYA multi-CDN configuration can help
maximize content delivery or application
performance even in the face of surging
traffic—deploying assets on several
CDNs at one time. This promotes
the best possible performance, helps
ensure 100% uptime, reduces costs, and
leverages regionally dominant CDNs.
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MAXIMIZE THE EFFECT
With a variety of options, the multiple CDNs need to be managed in a way that wrests the best value from them.
Different approaches to managing
traffic among multiple CDNs exist,
among them:
FAILOVERROUND ROBIN
GEOGRAPHICPERFORMANCE-BASED
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OPTIMIZING LOAD BALANCINGSource. Cache hits. ASNs, ISPs. With so many elements between the request and the fulfillment of a
service, maximizing delivery and maximizing the multi-CDN investment must use the best information.
Real User Measurements
Cedexis Real User Measurements (RUM) direct Openmix for intelligent, real time load balancing
that optimizes asset delivery for each individual client.
Cedexis Openmix makes tens of millions of unique decisions a day to route traffic to the best performing CDN. Openmix reduces cost, ensures availability, and maximizes key performance indicators (KPIs) that shape the user experience. All of those critical decisions are made using information collected in real time by Cedexis Radar.
Cedexis Openmix is a next-generation, data-driven global traffic management (GTM) system that routes content delivery from over 80 points of presence (PoPs) worldwide. By continuously monitoring and scoring public and private CDNs, clouds, and data centers globally from the perspective of hundreds of millions of real-time users, Openmix provides the premiere platform for optimizing performance across multiple delivery channels all over the world.
Cedexis Radar analyzes data from real end users—providing the most unbiased source of data for evaluating Cloud and CDNs. With a pool of over 5 billion measurements per day, Cedexis provides the world’s most accurate cloud and CDN metrics.
Optimal Routing and Load Balancing: Maximize the Multi-CDN
Investment
The Role of
Cedexis Openmix
The Role of
Cedexis Radar
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INCREASING VIDEO PERFORMANCE WITH A MULTI CDN STRATEGY
We’ve seen a 65% decrease in buffering incidents since deploying Cedexis Openmix. These quality of service improvements deliver better quality to the end user, resulting in incredibly low viewer abandonment rates.
— Manik Bambha, Chief Digital Officer and CTO, ViewLift
http://www.cedexis.com/blog/focus-on-video-the-evidence-for-how-cedexis-improves-your-online-video-performance/
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PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY FOR THE GLOBAL GAMING EXPERIENCE
ROBLOX is one of the largest user-generated online gaming
platforms operating today, maintaining over 15 million active
games created by users. With that success comes a challenge;
users across the globe expect a smooth, positive online gaming experience. That expectation
translates into pressure on developers and publishers of MMORPGs to effectively manage and
predict consumer traffic.
Using Cedexis Openmix, ROBLOX delivers best-in-class performance, 100 percent content availability, and dynamic control of the gaming platform. Here’s how:
• Cedexis routes around single CDN outages and reduced performance issues, providing
clients the best resource at the time of a request.
• Cedexis offers a more flexible load balancing strategy, based on providers’ current
performance. If a source is unavailable, Cedexis quickly directs traffic to another source.
If a route is slow, Cedexis points clients to the better option.
• ROBLOX maintains complete control over content delivery through use of the
Cedexis platform.
By federating asset delivery across multiple CDN providers we were able to leverage regional strengths of the individual providers, have automatic failover should a provider experience an outage, and most importantly, improve speed of delivery to our end users.
—Jared Shapiro, CEO Roblox
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SCALABILITY: BE READY WHEN DEMAND SPIKES
Moving to a multi-CDN approach will
create the foundation needed to provide
a better experience for users. Cedexis
Openmix and Radar help make managing
multiple CDNs easier while delivering the
quality users expect.
Cedexis Openmix implements multi-
CDN deployment successfully, making
decisions on how to route users to the
best-performing CDN.
Why Multi-CDN Makes Sense Using a multi-CDN approach:
PBS provides reliable on-demand video
for audiences numbering in the hundreds
of millions—no matter where or when
they watch.
High-traffic Premier Weeks are successful
for all their viewers. PBS serves an average
of 428 million video views per month
across all devices—83 percent of which
are delivered to a mobile platform.
Multi-CDN Approach
Ensures Quality User
Experience at PBS
A single CDN approach has its limits.
Whether you deliver a
premiere gaming experience,
maintain a high-traffic
ecommerce platform, or stream
over-the-top (OTT) video, one
CDN means accepting outages and
performance limitations.
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PRICING LEVERAGE AND GROWTH PLANNING: THE GIFT OF CONFIDENCE
By adopting a multi-CDN approach, businesses are better positioned to negotiate CDN rates. CDN providers, like all companies, want to maximize their value
by resisting price reductions. CDN transit rates for new contracts have been declining 15-
25% per year, according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com. It makes sense to use
multiple CDNs.
With multiple, high-performing CDNs available, content providers can deliver a premier
user experience more cost-effectively.
With Cedexis Openmix we automated real time load balancing between multiple CDNs. Page load times improved by 60% in China, dropping from 18 seconds down to 6 seconds.
—Eric Wyttynck, Director of Sales, Accor S.A.
Customer Case Study
60%50%25%
Improvement in China
In the US, Brazil, Thailand
Overall global improvement
Cedexis provides
the data to handle
growth confidently,
by adding the best service for the region, load,
and audience.
Accor S. A., the world’s sixth largest hotel group,
used Cedexis to plan and deploy new CDNs that
optimized their service in critical growth regions.
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AVAILABILITY: ONLINE STORES ARE ALWAYS OPEN
No matter how impressive a CDN’s service might be, no single provider can deliver 100 percent uptime. And that’s just not good enough, especially for online retailers.
Because a delivery interruption from a single
digital asset can slow page load speeds,
service needs to be fast and highly available.
An online retailer’s biggest nightmare is a
service outage, and that’s precisely what a
multi-CDN approach strives to avoid. Failover
CDNs perform too slowly for even moderate
traffic ecommerce.
Openmix enables federation of multiple CDNs as active-
active peers—making complete availability achievable. Openmix uses
performance-based multi-CDN load balancing—the ability to leverage real user measurements
(RUM) to make traffic-routing decisions.
When you buy online, you are really buying from an image. If there’s no image delivered, you’ve got nothing to drive sales.
— Rory Dennis, Founder, GM North America for Amplience
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AVAILABILITY: ONLINE STORES ARE ALWAYS OPEN (Continued)
One of the reasons we need Cedexis is that no CDN offers you 100 percent uptime for real. Multi-CDN managed with Cedexis Openmix enabled our 99.99 percent SLA.
— Rory Dennis
© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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No single CDN can realistically provide 100 percent availability. However, by intelligently balancing content delivery among multiple CDNs, availability can approach 100 percent.
© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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MANAGEMENT SIMPLICITY: FINDING THE BEST PERFORMING CDN AUTOMATICALLY
Put Multi-CDN Management on Auto-Pilot
Cedexis Openmix automatically manages load balancing
between multiple CDNs using billions of measurements
a day to determine which CDN will perform the best for
each request. The RUM measurements that drive Openmix
come from Cedexis Radar, a service that collects billions
of metrics every day from public clouds, public CDNs, and
private data centers. This ensures a user request is always
delivered from the best performing CDN for that user.
Easy to deploy and simple to use, the
Cedexis Openmix solution is completely
scriptable, allowing it to make decisions
based on logic as simple or complex as
the situation demands, while remaining
very simple to deploy as a JavaScript app
with many prefabricated open source
apps available.
The deployment is simple and straightforward. I rolled out one property with some help from my Cedexis team and then did the rest on my own. We plan to add more CDNs to ensure even better performance for every region that our viewers hail from.
— Manik Bambha, CTO at SnagFilms
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RELIABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND COST:BEATING EXPECTATIONS
Simply put, multiple CDNs perform better than a single CDN. This strategy improves performance, reduces costs, and promotes ease of management.
To learn more about selecting and executing the right Multi-CDN
strategy for you, read the next two papers in our series:
Link to Select 1st
Link to How to Select
Single vs. Multiple CDN Comparison
Throughout the world, multi-CDN strategies
improve performance.
*Actual customer results
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Challenge Cedexis Delivers Case Study
Increase performance
Decrease buffering
Speed startup
Increase user base
View Lift
Gaming experience
User experience unaffected by single resource outages
Load balancing optimized for business and performance criteria
Infrastructure readied for surges in popularity
Roblox
Scaling and growth
Know CDN performance for region, end device, and ISP
Define CDN usage by any criteria
Negotiate with service providers
Add the ideal resource for any growth scenario
PBS
Accor
Availability
Redirection away from outages and low-performing resources
Dynamic, automatic, with no administrator intervention
Users experience the most reliable service possible
Amplience
Simplified management
JavaScript deployment
Prebuilt scripts available
Ideal service and uptime without round the clock attention
Yves Rocher
CEDEXIS: CONTENT PROVIDER’S BEST FRIEND
© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.
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Founded in 2009, Cedexis
optimizes Web performance
across data centers, content
delivery networks (CDNs)
and clouds, for companies
that want to ensure 100%
availability and extend their
reach to new global markets.
Portland, Oregon421 SW 6th Ave, Suite 700Portland, OR 97204+1 855 CEDEXIS (233-3947)
Paris, France27 rue Raymond Lefebvre94250 Gentilly, France+33 (0)1 79 755 253