Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#1

Post by mxpxrocks10 » Sun, Jul 27, 2014, 11:08 PM UTC

Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour
scalescale.com

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#2

Post by kbar13 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:10 AM UTC

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point.

also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#3

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:14 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#4

Post by mxpxrocks10 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:15 AM UTC

kbar13 wrote: post #2

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point. also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

hey. thanks for the feedback. Yeah, it's more of an exercise for fun but it can also be done w/ high bandwidth dedicated servers as well. It's good as well if it's heavily dynamic stuff that needs really low latency and you need to execute something custom on the edge. Otherwise MaxCDN.com or a similar service scales better. I'm looking forward to building more custom stuff into our edges at MaxCDN.com so feel free to throw out any ideas. This was used to create a presentation for a docker meetup.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#5

Post by fmela » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:15 AM UTC

Thanks for sharing. Note that there's a typo in the link to Ewan's github profile (should start with https, not ttps).

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#6

Post by mxpxrocks10 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:17 AM UTC

fmela wrote: post #5

Thanks for sharing. Note that there's a typo in the link to Ewan's github profile (should start with https, not ttps).

thanks. will get it fixed shortly. this wasn't really scheduled for prime time but started taking off. appreciate the feedback!

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#7

Post by pushrax » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:31 AM UTC

kbar13 wrote: post #2

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point. also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

Actually, with DigitalOcean, you get quite a lot of bandwidth for the price. Additionally, their transfer limits are high (1TB for the $5 instances), and overage is only $0.02/GB. If you combine this with something like Route 53's anycast latency-routed DNS, it can work very well.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#8

Post by michaelmior » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:33 AM UTC

pushrax wrote: post #7

kbar13 wrote: post #2

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point. also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

Actually, with DigitalOcean, you get quite a lot of bandwidth for the price. Additionally, their transfer limits are high (1TB for the $5 instances), and overage is only $0.02/GB. If you combine this with something like Route 53's anycast latency-routed DNS, it can work very well.

Maybe it can work. I'm still a little skeptical. But I don't see why you would ever want to deal with managing all this infrastructure yourself when there are many established providers that can likely do a much better job at a comparable price.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#9

Post by pushrax » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:39 AM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #8

pushrax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, with DigitalOcean, you get quite a lot of bandwidth for the price. Additionally, their transfer limits are high (1TB for the $5 instances), and overage is only $0.02/GB. If you combine this with something like Route 53's anycast latency-routed DNS, it can work very well.

Maybe it can work. I'm still a little skeptical. But I don't see why you would ever want to deal with managing all this infrastructure yourself when there are many established providers that can likely do a much better job at a comparable price.

Managing the infrastructure is definitely where it falls short, but if you can get it done quickly it can be very cost-efficient for smaller projects. Three $5 DO boxes can easily handle > 1TB per month, which will cost over $100 on most CDNs.

Re: Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

#10

Post by Oculus » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 12:43 AM UTC

kbar13 wrote: post #2

rolling your CDN on VPS instances isn't exactly cost-effective, and is probably more of an exercise for fun than anything else. Unless you need features out of your CDN that you can't get from existing CDN providers, I don't really see the point. also kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN.

kind of unusual that this blog post is by the president of MaxCDN

It makes a lot of sense for the president of MaxCDN to make a blog post like this. Bob the developer decides to learn about how CDN's work and happens upon this blog post. Cool, Bob just built his own mini CDN network for fun. Now Bob understands that his CDN, though a fun weekend project, is definitely not production ready. What does Bob do when he needs a CDN he can put into production? He goes to the guys that established themselves as authorities on the topic: MaxCDN.

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