Growing beyond a single CDN:Peering content networks

Over the past year there has been a lot of buzz surrounding content peering. Much of this buzz was created by industry alliances that were created to address the need of increasing the scale and reach beyond what a single content delivery network (CDN) could provide.

SIDEBAR Did streaming go wrong? by Mark Kraynak According to a report  by Probe Research, Inc.,  the worldwide market for content-delivery services is expected to grow from $25 million in 1999 to  as much as $50 billion by 2005. READ MORE READING MATERIAL From Our Archives On the Web

Several interest groups drove this need based upon their business objectives. Content providers wanted to increase their freedom of CDN provider choice. CDN providers wanted to pool their interests and share their resources to economically provide increased capacities.

Access network providers wanted to link their content network infrastructure to CDN providers for improved quality of service delivery. While each interest group had its own objective, they all made it clear that a single CDN couldn’t address all of their needs.

Content peering is an emerging technology in the broader content networking market. Although, there are many perspectives and opinions on what constitutes content peering, rough consensus has been established by a broad spectrum of participants in this movement. This consensus initially began with the industry alliances and subsequently has been extended to the broader community through the open process of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Content peering is the interconnection of content networks for the purpose of extending both scale and reach.

Content peering is the interconnection of content networks for the purpose of extending both scale and reach. That is to say, greater economies of scale can be realized by cooperatively coupling content networks to virtually increase capacity, and at the same time, improve reach by using optimal delivery points in the cooperating content networks.

This reach is especially important for streaming media applications that need to be delivered from last mile edge server. The end result of content peering is better quality of service to consumers at lower distribution and delivery cost to content providers through the sharing content network resources.

Industry Alliances

Critical mass behind content peering began in the summer of 2000 with the creation of both the Content Bridge Alliance and the Content Alliance. These groups began as combined technical and marketing efforts.

INDUSTRY ALLIANCES

Content Bridge Alliance

A core of nine service providers:  Adero AmericanOnline Digital Island Exodus Genuity Inktomi MadgeWeb Mirror Image Nextra plusa technical advisory comprised of an additional 19 organizations. OBJECTIVE Enable member service providers to affiliate with one another in order to extend the reach and scale of their respective infrastructures.

Content Alliance

A broad forum of more than 70 organizations comprised of content providers, service providers and technology providers. OBJECTIVE Facilitate the interoperability of independent Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

Each group drafted a set of technical specifications based upon the requirements of their members and submitted them to the IETF in the fall of 2000.Subsequent to the transition of technical work to the IETF, both alliances have continued on with business development of marketing objectives. Additionally, the alliances continue to represent their member interests by providing requirement input to the open IETF technical process.

IETF Standards Activities

Content peering efforts within the IETF began with the submission of individual Internet Drafts by members of the alliances. An IETF Content Distribution Internetworking (CDI) Birds of a Feather (BoF) session was held in December 2000 to begin the process of reconciling and debating the merits these individual submissions. Since the initial BoF, much broader technical participation has and continues to occur within the IETF CDI activity.

To date, the CDI activity has produced a number of draft specifications covering deployment scenarios, a model, an architecture and a set of requirements for interconnection protocols. This work has been driven by the requirements of three principal interest groups, content providers, CDN operators and access network providers.

Each of these interest group perspectives has placed a unique set of requirements that are embodied in the draft specifications. Following the traditional IETF mantra of keep it as simple as possible, these requirements have been distilled down to a minimal set of key abstractions. These drafts are now in the final review cycle and will progressed to informational standards track shortly.

"Digital Island's expertise in building and managing a global, high performance content delivery network makes them the ideal operator for Content Bridge alliance services. Digital Island's expanded role ensures Content Bridge alliance members will receive dedicated operations and support, meaningful service level agreements, advanced billing and reporting, and a range of peering options to meet their business needs." -- Peter Galvin of Inktomi Chair of the Executive Advisory Board  of the Content Bridge alliance. READ MORE on the Content Bridge website NOT EVERYONE AGREES From Tele.com Dis-Content on Peering Digital Island’s Content Bridge buy sends out mixed messages by Brian Washburn 09/05/01, 1:16 p.m. ET

The resulting architecture calls for content internetworking gateways that provide three distinct interconnection services between content networks; request-routing, distribution and accounting. Request-routing involves coordinating the rendezvous of consumers with the proper content network delivery edge server.

Distribution involves coordinating the distribution of content to edge delivery servers throughout the interconnected content networks. Accounting involves coordinating the distribution of accounting artifacts throughout the interconnected content networks for billing and operations support system needs. Using these three interconnection services, it is possible to compose content peering relationships that meet the needs of the various interest groups.

Future CDI work is centered on developing the interconnection protocols that address the requirements of the current work. These are technically challenging protocols that will take some time to complete, likely a year or so. Once these protocols are completed, content peering will be in a position to be deployed using open interoperable standards.

INDUSTRY EVENT CDN: The Content Networking Event Fall 2001 December 4-6, 2001 San Jose, CA

Conclusions

Content peering is an emerging technology that promises to significantly extend the value of public carrier content networks. Additionally, it will likely have considerable value in the interconnection of enterprise content networks for extranet purposes. Standardization will make it possible to use off-the-shelf components to interconnect content networks, which in turn drive economies of scale and make it possible to easily establish affiliated business models between content network providers.

This standardization is likely to follow a similar telecommunications adoption path already pioneered by SS7 for telephony and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for IP transit. Given how these standards affected the competitive landscape, one can infer the public CDN service provider market will have a similar experience. This result will be improved efficiencies that ultimately benefit content providers and consumers through improved competition and economies of scale.
Gary Tomlinson is Chief Technology Officer for CacheFlow Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. He can be reached at gary.tomlinson@cacheflow.com.

Visit CacheFlow online.

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ON THE WEB
From WebTechniques.com
Content Delivery Networks: Build or Buy
By Mont Francisco

From The Aberdeen Group Digital Content Distribution: New Media, New Challenges Published: June, 2001

From CiscoWorld magazine
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) – A Reference Guide
By Matthew Liste, Thrupoint

From Network World
Peering challenge looms over content delivery networks
By April Jacobs, 02/23/01

From Interactive Week
Content Bridge Creaks Under Weight Of Dot-Com Busts
By Max Smetannikov
July 10, 2001 2:14 PM PT

cddcenter.com

CDNWeek
News, features, resources and commentary on Content Delivery Networks, updated every Monday

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