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Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour

scalescale.com

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

#21

Post by _delirium »

eli wrote: post #15
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.

If you have realtively low usage, Amazon CloudFront is already pretty cheap.

If you have quite low usage yes, and if you have quite high usage you probably won't be running a CDN on DigitalOcean anyway, but there's an in-between point where CloudFront is pretty expensive (by about 10x over the roll-your-own solution, depending on some assumptions about traffic).

If you build a smallish network of, say, 10 of the $10/mo, 2-TB-traffic DO servers, and can manage to spread the load such that you use an average of half of the free allocation, you pay $100/mo for 10 TB. Cloudfront would charge you $1200/mo for that data transfer. Obviously it's not the same level of reliability or ease of scaling, but it's cheaper enough to be vaguely intriguing—$1200/yr versus $14k/yr is non-peanuts!

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

#23

Post by mxpxrocks10 »

akerl_ wrote: post #11

I'm more than a little bit concerned that the article doesn't point out the serious risk of running a single DNS server for the records. I get that they're trying to keep things simple for their demo, but unsuspecting folks following this guide are in for quite a shock when their GeoDNS is taken out by a single physical server fault.

added this to the article in the "Todo" section. thanks for the feedback.

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

#27

Post by natch »

Nice. For tutorials like this it would be nice to see more details on the "how" of each step. For example:

"We setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

That's great, but it would be nice to see:

"Using the geodns web-based configuration tool, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

or

"Running on , we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

or

"By editing /etc/ on the , we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..."

In other words specifics are always really great to include.

But still this was a really great writeup, not just for the overview it gives of one lightweight approach but for the comments it has kicked off.

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

#28

Post by mxpxrocks10 »

natch wrote: post #27

Nice. For tutorials like this it would be nice to see more details on the "how" of each step. For example: "We setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." That's great, but it would be nice to see: "Using the geodns web-based configuration tool, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." or "Running on , we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." or "By editing /etc/ on the , we setup DNS…

great points. happy to take this approach on future posts and would love to collaborate in the future.

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

#29

Post by kawsper »

xxdesmus wrote: post #20

I'd recommend CloudFlare if you want AnyCast geo-DNS, and a free CDN. We don't charge for bandwidth or our DNS service. Disclosure: yes, I work at CloudFlare but the previous details are simply facts.

Do you have a link to CloudFlare geo-DNS? I have multiple servers in multiple parts of the world, and didn't know that Cloudflare supported that.

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

#30

Post by akg_67 »

mxpxrocks10 wrote: post #28
natch wrote: post #27

Nice. For tutorials like this it would be nice to see more details on the "how" of each step. For example: "We setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." That's great, but it would be nice to see: "Using the geodns web-based configuration tool, we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." or "Running on , we setup DNS info to point here (both NS1 and NS2..." or "By editing /etc/ on the , we setup DNS…

great points. happy to take this approach on future posts and would love to collaborate in the future.

I really liked your write-up. As natch mentioned, it will be great to include more details in the article. I like the detail level of Digital Ocean articles.

It seems based on my recent trial experience with CloudFlare that both CDN startups might have this issue of incomplete/insufficient instructions and information for their users/customers to properly implement the solution and lot of assumptions about the skill level of users implementing the solution.

Actually, I landed up providing detailed instructions to CloudFlare on configuration and testing of their service. And a list of questions, answers to which should be readily available if CF is targeting enterprise customers.

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