Rolling your own CDN for $25 in 1 hour • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by mxpxrocks10 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 9:35 AM UTC

pyvpx wrote: post #58

jbb555 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely topologically closest is most often what you want anyway?

sure, 80-90% of the time you get exactly what you want. but depending on your application and use-case, 10% can be a deal breaker of sorts. not that Geo location from notoriously inaccurate whois data is any better.

yeah, if you're only controlling one side of the conversation you just have to deal with the limitations. We use a lot of data from RUM measurements to further tune things.

That being said, if you control both sides you can do some better stuff (ie: Aspera, Netflix clients, etc) you can really ensure accuracy. Please feel free to post any good links to this stuff.

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

#62

Post by Kudos » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 9:35 AM UTC

adarshr wrote: post #56

Why is this page blocked by my UK work network?

The people doing the blocking can probably better answer that.

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

#63

Post by jamespo » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 9:38 AM UTC

pyvpx wrote: post #60

kawsper wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

before you gleefully skip into the panacea geo-DNS has been marketed as, please take a quick skim of this 2009 paper[1] from microsoft research about mobile clients and geolocation. has it gotten better in five years? is an exercise left for the reader :) [1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/maheshba/paper...

That seems to be of more concern for delivery of localized content than optimizing for closest data centre.

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

#64

Post by Artemis2 » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 9:43 AM UTC

mxpxrocks10 wrote: post #45

pyvpx wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anycast does not route to the geographically nearest datacenter but the topologically nearest. anycast is great, but it isn't magic. I get it: you have marketing folks that probably specifically told you not to delve into the details but let's face it..."anycast routes it to the nearest datacenter automatically!" isn't completely true.

Hey, this brings up a good point for some more clarification. There are two common ways CDNs do routing: method 1) by using a customized dns server (like the one I used in the example) that responds differently to the resolvers end users use. You can use something like Maxmind (like I did in the example) to determine where you think that resolver is. method 2) you can use anycast all the way to the TCP level for term…

I love MaxCDN, keep up the good work guys!

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

#65

Post by Kudos » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 9:49 AM UTC

lingben wrote: post #25

or you know, if your concern is cost, go with cdn.net and pay as you go for a kickass global cdn network full disclosure, I have no business or personal connection to them

There's 6TB of bandwidth built into this home rolled solution. That's going to cost at least $350 at cdn.net.

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

#66

Post by Goopplesoft » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 10:06 AM UTC

kawsper wrote: post #29

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.

This geo-DNS is related to finding Cloudflare's servers, not finding your servers. I love and use Cloudflare but their support for Route 53 like multi-host configurations (health checks, latency, etc) is pretty bad (I think they only support roundrobin cnames).

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

#67

Post by petercooper » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 10:07 AM UTC

mxpxrocks10 wrote: post #6

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!

Also wanted to note the post doesn't have enough Ron Smooth

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

#68

Post by corobo » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 10:23 AM UTC

Oculus wrote: post #10

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 ne…

Exactly this. I'm likely to need a CDN in the near-to-distant future. MaxCDN is now on my list because of this post

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

#69

Post by chrisan » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 10:24 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.

with DigitalOcean they ask you do not run a CDN: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/do-you-have...

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

#70

Post by acoyfellow » Mon, Jul 28, 2014, 11:16 AM UTC

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…

I think Genius and DigitalOcean = a match made in heaven. The quality would go from "the best" to "untouchable", if the comments were value adding. Imagine being able to dive deeper into any piece of the tutorial you wanted.