What is CDN = The Mysterious Embarrassment of CDN | The Most Fearful Thing is the Air Suddenly Going Quiet

The road to advanced popular science of the obscure term CDN

1. What is CDN?

High cold science:

CDN, the abbreviation of Content Delivery Network, is a layer of intelligent virtual network based on the existing Internet by placing node servers in various places on the network. The CDN system can redirect user requests to the service node closest to the user in real time based on comprehensive information such as network traffic and the connection and load status of each node, as well as the distance to the user and response time. Its purpose is to enable users to obtain the required content nearby, solve the problem of Internet network congestion, and improve the response speed of users visiting websites.

Content distribution network (CDN) is a strategically deployed overall system, including distributed storage, load balancing, network request redirection and content management. Content management and global network traffic management (Traffic Management) are the core of CDN. By judging the proximity of users and server load, CDN ensures that the content serves the user's request in an extremely efficient way.

Such an explanation will only make the dizzy person more dizzy...

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And then nothing happened. We couldn’t be friends anymore. . .

Let’s put it another way: You must make your friends resonate with you!!

Sentimental version: CDN is to the Internet as you are to me, it is always the invisible support behind me!! CDN is the technical support behind the Internet. Anything that touches the Internet will have CDN. Without it, we may have to wait until the mountains are gone and the sky and the earth are united to open web pages and videos... With it, it can be done in minutes! So its function is to make data transmission, that is, the network faster!!! A wonderful performance (that is, to make the speed reach ***) is inseparable from the silent dedication of the workers behind the scenes, and CDN is the worker behind the scenes of the Internet, silently dedicating its efforts to the cultivation, so that the end users who often use the Internet do not know who it is... Its main body is not a certain hardware, but a complete system, like a neural network spread all over the body, spread throughout each computer room, and is an invisible bridge between the Internet and traditional telecom operators.

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How CDN works

Temple-level description (as shown in the figure), *** explains the operation process of CDN:

Popular science of another dimension, wordless book of three dimensions...

Don’t understand?! I know a lot of people don’t understand, but if you compare the whole process to online shopping, I believe even girls who don’t understand technology will be enlightened!!!

Once upon a time, there was a big warehouse (origin server) that stored a lot of delicious food (data) such as potato chips, chocolate, plums, etc. (audio, video, files, etc.). Under the warehouse, there were many online stores and supermarkets (various nodes of proxy cache). The things in the big warehouse would be transferred to each supermarket for storage (caching) and sales (dispatching). If you (user) are in Beijing and want to eat plums (data), then the nearest store (node) in Beijing will send the plums to you (user request data). This process is the operation process of CDN. I believe that foodies will understand it! It's that simple...

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The Development of CDN

Although CDN sounds high-end and seems to have never appeared in people's vision, it is an ancient thing that was almost born with the Internet.

At MIT, a group of elites found that if they wanted people anywhere to quickly access their websites, they needed to publish their web pages to places closest to believers, just like building churches all over the world. So, they used a simple cache mirroring method to achieve this release. In 1998, they founded Akami, which is still the world's largest CDN service provider.

The first to enter this network was Yahoo! in 1999. This was the first time CDN was put into commercial use.

Let us continue to review the days after that dazzling moment of the Internet and CDN. The Internet has experienced the bursting of bubbles and the innovation of new models, but CDN seems to have been gradually forgotten.

We are familiar with B2B, C2C, B2C, P2P, search, bidding ranking, Page Ranking, RSS, Wiki, Meshup, podcasting, online games, Social Network... There are so many terms that we are familiar with, but we don’t actually understand their true meaning. But among the few that we casually mention when showing off our Internet experience, the only one not mentioned is CDN... until the emergence of short videos.

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When YouTube appeared in front of the world, people cheered for another revolution in the Internet. At the same time, people saw the powerful CDN support behind YouTube. It was this CDN network that displayed countless YouTube videos in front of people. At this time, people found that CDN was indispensable. After such a long period of obscurity, CDN suddenly became famous overnight, and everyone suddenly realized a little-known field.

Since then, CDN has become a popular term, especially after Goldman Sachs led a $120 million investment in LimeLight. Suddenly, CDN companies of all sizes appeared all over the world, and countless investments poured in.

To date, the United States has more than 80% of the market share in the entire CDN industry. North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific are the three major markets in the world, of which Akami has more than 50% of the global CDN market share; more than 60% (300) of the world's top 500 companies use Akamai's CDN services; Akamai carries nearly 1/3 of the world's Internet traffic. LimeLight was once the world's second largest CDN service provider, but has now been surpassed by Amazon and left far behind.

Data from datanyze report

The picture comes from Extra Large (ID: ITXXXL)

So CDN is developing so rapidly abroad, what about China?

Development of CDN in China

Compared with the United States, China's CDN started relatively late. Just as the Internet rose late in China, the changes in the CDN industry are also closely related to the Internet industry. It is the continuous rise and change of new Internet formats that have enabled the CDN industry to go through the wilderness and gradually form today's lively and prosperous industry situation. Its development can be roughly divided into three stages:

The climax was from 2000 to 2010, which was also the climax of traditional CDN vendors.

Before 2000, Akamai, Digital Island and other companies established branches in China and penetrated into the country. Some domestic IDCs and ISPs began to sell the services of foreign CDN service providers, and telecom operators established their own internal or regional CDN networks - using a large number of NetApp/Radware hardware products.

China did not start to introduce CDN technology until 2000. With the support of the Ministry of Information Industry, ChinaCache began commercial trials, and Sina became the first customer to use ChinaCache CDN services. In June 2002, ChinaCache was officially approved for commercial operation, opening up the territory of China's CDN market. Subsequently, Wangsu, Dilian and others also joined the camp.

In 2010, the industry reached its peak as established CDN vendors such as Wangsu and ChinaCache went public. The explosion of the industry was mainly due to the rise of online businesses such as online games, online videos, and e-commerce. During this development period, the development of established CDN vendors was mainly driven by resources. Most of them cooperated with telecom operators to purchase abundant network node resources and hoarded a large amount of bandwidth resources to form industry barriers.

In the past decade, as an infrastructure of the Internet industry, the CDN industry has been calm, and the vast majority of the market has been firmly occupied by traditional CDN manufacturers such as Wangsu and ChinaCache.

The second stage was from 2010 to 2014, when the Internet completed the transfer and transition from PC to mobile.

Due to the explosion of mobile Internet, a large number of mobile applications have emerged, which has led to the growth of the CDN market. Due to the lagging technological development, traditional CDN vendors can no longer meet the needs of BAT Internet giants for IDC and CDN. In addition, the CDN industry has been opaque and chaotic for a long time, so Internet giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu have built their own computer rooms. While launching cloud services, they have also begun to open CDN services to the industry as an important service content. However, self-built CDN not only has a high construction cost, but also a high maintenance cost in the later stage. It is only suitable for Internet giants with huge business volume. For general Internet companies, there is basically no capital and energy to build their own CDN.

The third stage is after 2015, when CDN technology was comprehensively innovated and CDN entered its golden age.

In 2015, the Internet industry entered the live broadcast year. The era of universal live broadcast has arrived, traffic has exploded, and CDN manufacturers have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. A large number of startups have entered the CDN market with technological innovation, especially Star Domain CDN and Yunfan Acceleration. Innovative CDN manufacturers continue to innovate in technology and flexibly customize, winning the market with disruptive prices and personalized customization, setting off a hurricane in China's CDN industry.

Take Yunfan Accelerator as an example. It takes advantage of its inherited streaming media playback technology from Qvod and independently develops its CDN architecture. Its performance and stability exceed those of open source systems, which helps to completely eliminate the risk of content tampering and flexibly meet the customized needs of various customers.

Since taking over the business in the second half of 2015, it has reached cooperation with many well-known domestic websites such as Xinlan.com, Jiangsu Satellite TV, Southern New Media, PPTV, Zhanqi, Bilibili, 360, and Yinyuetai, covering the streaming media field. In July 2016, it established an important partnership with Liangfengtai, the leader of the AR industry, and began to layout the AR industry through comprehensive cooperation from products to platforms. On August 1, 2016, the US CDN node was officially fully opened. By accelerating overseas CDN nodes with Yunfan, Chinese companies can quickly realize the globalization of their businesses, and Chinese users can also experience overseas Internet applications.

Wang Xijie, founder and top evangelist of Yunfan Accelerator, also said: The company plans to open source the CDN architecture system to major enterprises for sharing in the next 1-2 years, and build a CDN system open sourced by Chinese. Yunfan Accelerator entered the market as a dark horse, shaking the entire industry.

At present, the Chinese CDN market has shown a "three-legged" situation, with professional CDN, self-built CDN and innovative CDN all occupying a piece of the world.

CDN Development Prospects

According to the "Content Distribution Network (CDN) White Paper (2015)" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Akamai, a US CDN service provider, has firmly established itself as the world's leading CDN service provider, achieving CDN business revenue of US$1.964 billion in 2014, a year-on-year increase of 24.5%. Although Chinese CDN service providers have covered more than 100 regions around the world, including the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Macau, China, etc., there is still a huge gap in market share with American companies.

According to Datanyze data, among the top 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 websites ranked by Alexa, although the rankings of CDN service providers vary, American companies firmly dominate the market.

According to statistics, among the top 1,000 Alexa websites using CDN, the CDN service providers with the highest adoption rates are Akamai (41.4%), Amazon CloudFront (11.9%), EdgeCast (8.2%), FastlyCDN (6.7%), and CloudFare (3.9%); Akamai and Amazon CloudFront together account for more than half. Chinese CDN service providers with a high usage rate among the top 1,000 Alexa websites include Wangsu (3.4%), Xinnet (2.6%), ChinaCache (2.4%), Taobao (1.7%), and Tencent (0.6%).

The CDN service providers with the highest usage rate among the top 10,000 Alexa websites are Akamai (31.3%), Amazon CloudFront (20.8%), EdgeCast (8.0%), MaxCDN (4.6%) and FastlyCDN (4.4%); the gap between Akamai and AmazonCloudFront has narrowed, and their combined share still exceeds half. The Chinese CDN service providers used by the top 10,000 Alexa websites are Wangsu (3.4%), ChinaCache (1.9%), Xinnet (1.8%), Taobao (0.6%) and Tencent (0.4%).

The Chinese CDN service providers used by the top 100,000 Alexa websites include Wangsu (3.0%), ChinaCache (1.4%), Xinnet (1.2%), Tencent (0.9%), and Taobao (0.6%).

Although Chinese CDN service providers have emerged in the past two years, their global market share needs to be further improved, and there is still a broader space for international market development. In recent years, with the introduction of a series of Internet-related policies in my country, especially the launch of my country's "Internet +" action, my country's CDN industry has ushered in a golden period of development. The rapid growth of video, games, social, e-commerce and other businesses has provided continuous impetus for the development of CDN; with the rise of big data, cloud computing and 5G, the interconnection of all things has become a general trend. In the future, the Internet of Things will gradually replace the Internet and create a larger space for data transmission. AI, VR, AR, MR, 4K high-definition video and other black technologies have gradually stepped down from the altar and integrated into various fields with the changes in people's lifestyles, providing new impetus for the development of CDN.

Summary: The CDN industry is also ushering in a new period of development, and the imagination space and development prospects of the CDN market are widely optimistic.