Travis built RedSwoosh (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Swoosh) and then went on to build Uber. Now someone saw Uber and claims it inspired them to rebuild RedSwoosh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
An Uber-like CDN
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#12There's a bunch of really obvious objections to this idea around performance, privacy, economics, UX, and reliability. Impressively, the post did not manage to address any of them up front. 1. Performance. In terms of latency, this is adding an extra round-trip to each page request (to get the metadata). It's also likely going to load different resources from different servers (hostname, IP) preventing connection reu…
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Re: An Uber-like CDN
#13There are several red flags here, not the least of which is that a CDN isn't just about bandwidth, it is about disk. If a cache node doesn't have the object, it has to go to origin to get it. That has a cost at origin, which most CDN customers want to minimize.
Cache management (eviction, invalidation, etc) is done where? By the look of that diagram, you are actually doubling your origin traffic just to push to the cache after serving the original client request. Perhaps subsequent requests could get served from their 'peer' but the hit rate will be abysmal.
Maybe there is more to it than they describe here, but I don't see how this can work. Are they going to rewrite the object in a way that doesn't require the host certificate?
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#14There's a bunch of really obvious objections to this idea around performance, privacy, economics, UX, and reliability. Impressively, the post did not manage to address any of them up front. 1. Performance. In terms of latency, this is adding an extra round-trip to each page request (to get the metadata). It's also likely going to load different resources from different servers (hostname, IP) preventing connection reu…
>1. Performance. In terms of latency, this is adding an extra round-trip to each page request (to get the metadata). It's also likely going to load different resources from different servers (hostname, IP) preventing connection reuse. I guess they can't even start fetching data until the full page has loaded?
fair point. We use same technique as lazy-load (you have to wait the full page has loaded).
>3. Economics. If running peer servers really was profitable
Uber doesn't drive taxis himself, airBnB doesn't own property. This is how Uber-economy works. We believe it works in the CDN industry as well. We just don't want to be another CDN provider.
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#15Re: An Uber-like CDN
#16Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth, and allocate them to this purpose. I see four possibilities: - They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server, in which case the third party is losing money and shouldn't be doing this. - They are paying the third party at least what it costs to rent the server…
>Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth:
Bare-metal servers are much better is our case. Please note, bandwidth is not free. You can follow the links and see the actual price for it. If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7.
>- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server
we don't know prices in all datacenters all over the world. That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service.
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#17Related: P2P CDN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=p2p%20cdn , https://hn.algolia.com/?query=peer%20to%20peer%20cdn
kind of. They are WebRTC-based CDN.
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#18There's a bunch of really obvious objections to this idea around performance, privacy, economics, UX, and reliability. Impressively, the post did not manage to address any of them up front. 1. Performance. In terms of latency, this is adding an extra round-trip to each page request (to get the metadata). It's also likely going to load different resources from different servers (hostname, IP) preventing connection reu…
>1. Performance.
also please note:
if you have 1 image on the page - we have to do 2 requests (1 metadata, 1 download)
if you have 50 images on the page - we have to do 51 requests only (1 metadata for all images, 50 downloads)
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#19What problem does this solve? Cloudflare is already free.
Not for serious volumes, there's also a load more feaatures only paid and enterprise accounts get.
Re: An Uber-like CDN
#20Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth, and allocate them to this purpose. I see four possibilities: - They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server, in which case the third party is losing money and shouldn't be doing this. - They are paying the third party at least what it costs to rent the server…
>Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth: Bare-metal servers are much better is our case. Please note, bandwidth is not free. You can follow the links and see the actual price for it. If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7. >- They are paying the third party less than what…
> If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7.
While that is true in theory, if you in practice saturate your bandwidth 24x7 by reselling it your contract will probably get cancelled (or at least that is the case for most "unlimited" contracts).
I don't think you actually answered the questions of the parent.