CDNs for carriers

Mon Jun 29 13:44:18 UTC 2015

> On Jun 29, 2015, at 9:33 AM, Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Ramy Hashish <ramy.ihashish at gmail.com> wrote:
>> do you have any figures about how much this
>> recommended CDN save from the Internet BW?
> 
> isn't that going to wholey depend on your traffic mix/matrix?
> Wouldn't it be helpful to look at where your users send/receive
> traffic and then figure out the best next addition?
> 
> Maybe your best bet isn't another CDN, but better/more/wider peering
> with folk 2+ AS hops out from your current next-hop-as set?

I would say that step 1 is to figure out where your traffic is going.  Generically saying “CDN” isn’t enough to know what the results are. 

Once you’ve determined where the traffic is going/coming from you can start to make educated decisions vs just “CDN” guessing.  An enterprise profile looks much different than residential for example.

I recall some companies calling our NOC “under attack” because their software update server went down and the machines failed safe and were all fetching software updates from “the internet” vs the internal caching proxy.

If you have money to spend, there are a few vendors out there from cheap to $$$$ that will help you look at the traffic to make these decisions.

If you don’t have money to spend, look at NFSen/pmacct.  You may be able to spin up a low-cost VM at your local cloud provider (e.g.: digital ocean).

Remember to export both your v6 and v4 (ip classic) flows as these can widely differ.

Look for common ASNs or IP ranges.

I’m sure there’s numerous consultants on the list that would also assist you in this process.

Hope this helps.

- jared