Facing the high pressure of price war, how will Yunfan Accelerator choose to break through?

[51CTO.com original article] What kind of CDN vendor is Yunfan Accelerator? It has been able to successfully win CDN acceleration service cooperation with many well-known domestic websites such as Xinlan.com, Jiangsu Satellite TV, PPTV, Southern New Media, Zhanqi Live, 360, etc. from traditional CDN giants such as Wangsu and ChinaCache. The reporter has always been curious about this. At the 2017 Asia-Pacific CDN Summit held recently, the reporter finally had the honor to interview Mr. Fu Kai, the co-founder and CTO of Yunfan Accelerator.

Who is Fukai?

Fu Kai was the technical director of Yinyuetai and worked for Tudou.com, Gome, ChinaCache and other companies. In 2015, when Wang Xijie and Tong Yongyue, the other two founders of Yunfan Accelerator, approached him to provide third-party CDN acceleration services, Fu Kai joined Yunfan Accelerator with his own CDN system architecture that had already taken shape. He has 14 years of experience in the industry and has experienced the entire process of the CDN industry in China from scratch to great development, and is proficient in the entire CDN architecture scheduling.

[[189402]]

Co-founder and CTO Mr. Fu Kai

Talking about the development of the CDN industry, Fu Kai said: "From 2007 to now, there has not been any major fundamental changes in the CDN industry. At present, I have not seen any disruptive technology, nor too many major changes, but the technology is still moving forward in small steps."

At present, the CDN industry has entered an era of full competition, which means transparent prices and thin profits. Especially with the participation of giant companies, price wars are becoming more and more serious. In this regard, Fu Kai believes that the origin of CDN is to solve the acceleration of customers and solve various special needs of customers. In today's big video era, how to promote the development of CDN and help emerging video companies develop is the responsibility of CDN companies, rather than just relying on price wars and business relationships to survive in the industry. The CDN industry needs a stable network, security, and good business layer technology. Therefore, the goal of Yunfan Acceleration is first to create a CDN company with a stable, efficient, and secure technical flow.

"Therefore, in 2017, Yunfan Accelerator's primary goal is not to be a company with the fastest growth rate, but to operate in a refined manner to survive in the competition. I think this is the most important thing," said Fu Kai.

Yunfan Accelerator has a way to survive and become a leading CDN manufacturer

Yunfan Accelerator provides global CDN network acceleration services, mainly in China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, India and other regions, especially in the network acceleration between China and the United States, achieving a live broadcast delay of only 1.5S between China and the United States. At present, Yunfan Accelerator mainly provides: CDN acceleration and P2P acceleration for live broadcast, on-demand, web pages and download services, and provides complete video live broadcast and on-demand solutions and services.

Yunfan accelerates self-developed cache software

The CDN system is divided into two parts, one is the cache system and the other is the control system. Fu Kai said that the cache system is the core. Based on years of experience in using and developing caches, the team has absorbed the most advanced ideas in the industry and developed a set of software completely independently. For the important storage system of the cache system, Yunfan Accelerator has developed a private file system that supports file block storage and billion-level object storage. Dynamic and static files can be automatically identified, and the dynamic and static identification of traffic between the customer's source station and the CDN upper node and the lower node can be realized with a very simple principle. In addition, in order to reduce personnel configuration costs and operational errors, Yunfan Accelerator has developed a small language that abstracts more than 95% of the business logic in the CDN field with language. Operation and maintenance personnel, sales personnel and customers can directly configure it without looking for R&D. The background code compilation system can compile all operations into a binary file, distribute it to the entire network within 3 seconds, and load it directly into the memory to take effect, avoiding various online loading and minimizing errors. It truly achieves what you see is what you get, and it takes effect as soon as you click.

With the general trend of video content on the entire network, Yunfan Accelerator provides a complete set of live cloud and on-demand cloud SAAS solutions for all walks of life. Enterprises can easily have their own video apps or embedded video functions, and enjoy the one-stop services provided by Yunfan Accelerator, such as customized product development, CDN acceleration, and operation and maintenance. Eliminating technical bottlenecks, enterprises can focus more on content and user operations themselves.

Yunfan Accelerated's shared CDN integrates enterprise-level spare bandwidth, commercial routing and user home ADSL to create a cost-effective shared CDN product, and establishes a compensation mechanism with self-built CDNs. The shared CDN ensures sufficient resources.

Facing the high pressure of price war, how will Yunfan Accelerator choose to break through?

So, how can Yunfan Accelerator break through? Yunfan Accelerator's senior management has been thinking about this question. Although Yunfan Accelerator is not as big as traditional manufacturers such as Wangsu and ChinaCache in the CDN field, nor does it have the huge resources of Internet giants such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, Yunfan Accelerator also has its own advantages, a neutral market position, no historical baggage, standing at the forefront of the latest technology from the beginning, and its designs are all oriented towards cloud development, which is something that ordinary CDN companies do not have.

Fu Kai also admitted that in terms of nodes, Yunfan Accelerator may not be able to compete with cloud service providers in terms of pure CDN node resources. Because as an innovative company, it focuses more on technological innovation rather than competing for resources and price wars. In addition, the original intention of CDN is to allow users to have a faster access experience in a limited network environment, so Yunfan Accelerator insists on continuous optimization in technology, using flexible back-to-source, dynamic upper layer and other technologies to make up for the disadvantages in resources, maximize the utilization efficiency of machines, and ultimately achieve super performance.

In terms of security, Yunfan Accelerator currently focuses on the video field. Analysis shows that there are fewer attacks on videos, and most attacks are on web pages, with the most common being hotlinking. In response, Yunfan Accelerator provides three levels of anti-hotlinking technology: the simplest IP blacklist and whitelist, Refer, and anti-hotlinking; dynamic URL parameter and path anti-hotlinking; and the exclusive content block encryption technology, which can achieve the best anti-hotlinking effect, especially for live broadcasts.

Fu Kai said that Yunfan Accelerator's goal in 2017 is to maintain a steady pace of development and survive under tremendous pressure. In the future, Yunfan Accelerator will continue to focus on technology research and development innovation. The reason why traditional CDN companies are declining is that they pay more attention to sales and ignore technological development, so that they can't keep up with the current era. Price wars will not last long, and will eventually fall on the competition of technological value. At present, many emerging CDN companies are doing platform integration instead of CDN! Therefore, in Fu Kai's view, new companies should calm down and do a good job in underlying technology to promote changes in the industry. And only if the technical strength is strong enough, pay attention to user experience, and survive under strong pressure, the future will be wider and wider.

When talking about the specific technology development plan, Fu Kai revealed to the reporter: "We particularly want to turn our CDN into a customizable CDN, which can be used according to my ideas, or make CDN a part of the entire website. So next, we hope to provide such a system, in which the architecture of the entire network can be defined, and even an architecture that is not only accelerated but also anti-attack and active-active. In other words, turn our CDN into a universal gateway. In addition, we are also actively deploying technologies related to emerging fields such as video cloud computing and VR."

[51CTO original article, please indicate the original author and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]