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Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

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Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#51

Post by janoszen »

rsync wrote: post #49

I have always thought it would be a fun and inspiring project to deploy a global CDN ... my career and my lifelong hobby have both been "UNIX sysadmin" and I love running networks ... However, I spoke about this to some ISP/NANOG folks that I trust and they said that running a real CDN is a nightmare because all of your links (providers) hate you ... you're producing the exact opposite of the traffic that they want a…

It depends on the scale. Running a personal blog with sub-1MiB/s traffic is not a problem. I've seen some larger projects though where detailed data analysis had to be employed to debug bad connections... that's not a one-man-job and it was a serious headache to work around some of the less... neutral providers.

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#52

Post by manigandham »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #29
nathan_f77 wrote: post #22

That's a fun project. For production websites and blogs, I'm pretty happy with Netlify, CloudFlare, and CloudFront. But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates [1], so you could save a lot of money by just spinning up ~10 servers in different AWS regions. I noticed this line at the bottom of the page: "When it comes to picking a solution, I often choose the less traveled road". I don't agree wit…

The $600/mo figure has to be considered against the type of workload your servers run, and how variable your traffic patterns are. If you need to handle bursty traffic, you're likely going to get best value in shared tenancy services until you can fully utilize your servers. Otherwise, you will probably end up paying for idle infrastructure.

It has nothing to do with workload, that's the price for a dedicated IP to serve a TLS certificate to serve the (rapidly diminishing number of) non-SNI capable browsers and devices.

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#53

Post by manigandham »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #22

That's a fun project. For production websites and blogs, I'm pretty happy with Netlify, CloudFlare, and CloudFront. But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates [1], so you could save a lot of money by just spinning up ~10 servers in different AWS regions. I noticed this line at the bottom of the page: "When it comes to picking a solution, I often choose the less traveled road". I don't agree wit…

That price is only for non-SNI browser and devices, which is probably less than 1% of devices/browsers now [1]. Otherwise Cloudfront supports free custom certificates and you can use Amazon's Certificate Manager to acquire and renew them automatically, also for free.

https://www.digicert.com/ssl-support/apache-secure-multiple-...

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#54

Post by homero »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #22

That's a fun project. For production websites and blogs, I'm pretty happy with Netlify, CloudFlare, and CloudFront. But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates [1], so you could save a lot of money by just spinning up ~10 servers in different AWS regions. I noticed this line at the bottom of the page: "When it comes to picking a solution, I often choose the less traveled road". I don't agree wit…

I use https://www.keycdn.com which has free letsencrypt

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#55

Post by sciurus »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #22

That's a fun project. For production websites and blogs, I'm pretty happy with Netlify, CloudFlare, and CloudFront. But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates [1], so you could save a lot of money by just spinning up ~10 servers in different AWS regions. I noticed this line at the bottom of the page: "When it comes to picking a solution, I often choose the less traveled road". I don't agree wit…

> But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates

This is misleading. Cloudfront doesn't charge anything for putting your domains on an SSL cert that uses SNI. They only change you if you need a cert without SNI, which requires them to allocate a dedicated IP address to you.

I'm hosting my personal blog on S3 and cloudfront, with SSL, for less than a dollar a month.

Performance and capabilities are fine for me, too. I get 0.15 seconds to first byte from Chicago, vs 0.24 for the author's site.

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/180214_K2_28c2826a6422b01...

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/180214_QT_a91f7af3bf78e7b...

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#56

Post by janoszen »

sciurus wrote: post #55
nathan_f77 wrote: post #22

That's a fun project. For production websites and blogs, I'm pretty happy with Netlify, CloudFlare, and CloudFront. But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates [1], so you could save a lot of money by just spinning up ~10 servers in different AWS regions. I noticed this line at the bottom of the page: "When it comes to picking a solution, I often choose the less traveled road". I don't agree wit…

> But CloudFront charges $600 per month for custom SSL certificates This is misleading. Cloudfront doesn't charge anything for putting your domains on an SSL cert that uses SNI. They only change you if you need a cert without SNI, which requires them to allocate a dedicated IP address to you. I'm hosting my personal blog on S3 and cloudfront, with SSL, for less than a dollar a month. Performance and capabilities are…

If you are fine with having slashes at the end of your URLs and you do not want to do anything too complicated like content negotiation for image types, S3 and CloudFront is fine. The moment you turn on Lambda@Edge, to do the magic, things get slow after a period of no traffic.

I plan on expanding on the featureset, so no S3 for me. :)

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#57

Post by vasco »

ksec wrote: post #44
kirankn wrote: post #2

We currently use KeyCDN which works out well, both performance & money wise. You may want to try it out.

Why KeyCDN ? Why not MaxCDN or Fastly etc?

MaxCDN has shitty performance, terrible monitoring. We have to tell them when their servers are overloaded due to our monitoring detecting regions with super high SSL negotiation times.

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#59

Post by severine »

davidu wrote: post #46
jgrahamc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not our experience either. BGP is fine. But it is the case that transit and peering connections are not stable (in the sense of going up and down randomly or suddenly experiencing high levels of packet loss) and active monitoring is a must.

Is your experience that when routes reconverge, they still select the same end POP they did prior to the flap? Assuming the end POP is still reachable along another regional route, I believe all the data I've seen shows that the client almost always hits the same destination they did before the flap.

What is POP?

Re: Building Your Own CDN for Fun and Profit

#60

Post by janoszen »

severine wrote: post #59
davidu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your experience that when routes reconverge, they still select the same end POP they did prior to the flap? Assuming the end POP is still reachable along another regional route, I believe all the data I've seen shows that the client almost always hits the same destination they did before the flap.

What is POP?

A POP or edge location is a server (or multiple) that the user traffic is being routed to, hopefully close to the user. A CDN consists of multiple POPs, one in each region, with intelligent traffic routing added (as described in the article).
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