Yunfan Accelerator CTO Fu Kai: Stick to the origin and become a technical CDN company

On April 12-13, 2017, the 2017 Asia Pacific CDN Summit was held in Beijing. At the Video Cloud Forum on the morning of the 13th, Yunfan Accelerator co-founder and CTO Fu Kai delivered a keynote speech entitled "Content Distribution in the Big Video Era".

Fu Kai, Co-founder and CTO of Yunfan Accelerator

Three major issues: What should CDN do in the future?

At the beginning of his speech, Fu Kai raised three questions: 1. Video traffic accounts for 80% of network traffic. Will live broadcast or on-demand video traffic account for more in the future? 2. The current CDN industry is very competitive and new companies are constantly emerging. Where will these new companies go? 3. Why are traditional CDN companies declining, while emerging CDN companies and cloud companies are thriving and developing rapidly?

Fu Kai said that the traffic of on-demand is still much higher than that of live broadcast. Moreover, the content of live broadcast is changing into on-demand content such as short videos, and on-demand is still the main source of CDN traffic. The decline of traditional CDN companies is basically due to one reason: technology. CDN companies in those days paid more attention to sales and ignored technological development, so that traditional CDN companies cannot keep up with the current era. How should emerging CDN companies develop? At present, many emerging CDN companies are engaged in platform integration rather than CDN! Fu Kai believes that new companies should calm down and do a good job in underlying technology to promote changes in the industry.

The origin of CDN companies is to accelerate solutions to customers' special needs

Fu Kai believes that the current CDN industry is a bit unhealthy: new CDN companies are emerging rapidly, but everyone is engaged in price wars, especially the entry of giant companies, which makes the price war more and more serious; but the origin of CDN is to solve the acceleration of customers and solve various special needs of customers. CDN company R&D personnel receive various emerging technical requirements that are beneficial to the development of the industry every day. Fu Kai said that if every company benefits from it, the entire industry will undergo tremendous changes.

How to promote the development of CDN and help emerging video companies grow is the responsibility of CDN companies, rather than relying solely on price wars and business relationships to survive in the industry. Fu Kai said that Yunfan Acceleration wants to create a CDN company with a stable, efficient and secure technology flow.

Independently develop CDN system to build a more stable transmission network

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 cache use and development, 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 accelerates the self-developed private file system, supports file block storage, and supports billion-level object storage. Dynamic and static files can be automatically identified, and the traffic between the customer's source station and the CDN upper node and the lower node is realized with a very simple principle.

Regarding CDN node deployment and link selection, Yunfan Accelerator conducts real-time data center machine quality analysis, big data analysis of user viewing behavior, network conditions, etc., and combines P2P multi-channel transmission technology to achieve a spider-web network structure. All nodes are unified, both edge and upper layers. The entire system is very flexible, and node links can be adjusted dynamically. This not only reduces transmission costs and improves terminal transmission speeds, but also changes the data dependence on central nodes in the previous CDN tree structure transmission process, avoiding global failures caused by core node problems.

In order to reduce staffing costs and operational errors, Yunfan accelerated the development of a small language that abstractly expresses more than 95% of the business logic in the CDN field. Operation and maintenance personnel, sales personnel, and customers can directly configure it without having to find R&D. The background code compilation system can compile all operations into a binary file, which is distributed to the entire network within 3 seconds and can be directly loaded into the memory to take effect, avoiding various online loading and minimizing errors. It truly achieves what you see is what you get, and takes effect as soon as you click. Traditional CDN companies, if they want to make an anti-hotlink, need to change the cache software itself, and then desperately release versions. After the entire network is updated, customers connect one by one. The process is slow and prone to errors.

Build a comprehensive security system to ensure the security of customer platforms and content

Fu Kai said that the most common problem currently faced in the live broadcast field is hotlinking, which causes huge losses to enterprises. Yunfan Accelerator has three levels of anti-hotlinking technology: the simplest IP black and white list, Refer, and anti-hotlinking; dynamic URL parameters and path anti-hotlinking; and exclusive research and development of content block encryption technology. According to Fu Kai, he helped a radio and television customer encrypt content blocks to prevent hotlinking, and the original 300G of traffic was reduced to more than 50G. Fu Kai also said that for on-demand, using dynamic URL parameters and paths can achieve a good anti-theft effect; and H5 is the most troublesome, and it is basically difficult to do anti-hotlinking. To address this problem, Yunfan uses asynchronous disabling technology, and will ban/block illegal users in real time based on big data analysis during the request process.

One-stop live and on-demand video cloud solution

Most of Yunfan Accelerator's technical team members are from the original Qvod, and have deep accumulation of streaming media technology and multiple core technology invention patents. Under 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.

Of course, there are many functional requirements in the video field, especially interactive live broadcasting, which has many ways of playing based on user interaction and rewarding. Yunfan Accelerator does not develop all functions by itself. For functions that customers have demand or potential demand, Yunfan Accelerator has done a lot of testing and screening in the market, screened out the industry's best functions, and integrated them into the Yunfan Accelerator core system.

In the process of rapid development, Yunfan accelerates the integration of redundant resources such as self-built CDN, commercial routing, and user home ADSL. Through policy scheduling and user collaborative filtering mechanisms, it matches resources with different business needs of different customers, creates cost-effective shared CDN products, and helps customers realize the realization of sunk assets. After continuous optimization, the success rate of shared CDN playback exceeds 99%, and the fluency is over 95%. When applied to live broadcast, the first screen time can be less than 1s and the live broadcast delay is about 1s, which is completely comparable to self-built CDN, but can help enterprises save more than half of CDN costs.

***, Fu Kai said that he has always believed that "the current *** requirements will definitely be the *** requirements in the future", and will continue to lead the team to explore and create the value of CDN companies on the Internet.