Teleport Media Smart API Case
Running in-house CDN? Want to get the most of it? We encourage you to get 1 Tbps out of 200 Gbps of your in-house CDN
When it comes to making a decision on the investments into in-house CDN, its capacity and costs are calculated according to the forecast of intraday traffic and possible peaks. How powerful your in-house CDN will be — here comes the CDN dilemma.
#1 You have an option to invest lots of money into in-house CDN enabling to serve virtually any traffic, including any peak. Pros: you don’t have to manage external CDNs. Cons: your in-house CDN stays idle most of the time; the money you have invested is not fully working.
#2 Otherwise, you build in-house content delivery infrastructure enough to serve traffic up to a certain point, and you purchase additional Terabytes from the external CDN whenever needed. Pros: you save the investment budget. Cons: you have to purchase most of the traffic from external CDN, which is expensive indeed.
No matter how you solve this CDN dilemma, as your broadcasting business and the viewership grow, it comes to the point when the majority of traffic is purchased from the external CDN.
This CDN dilemma has lived for decades. Until now, as the new type of peer-to-peer CDN entered the market.
How peer-to-peer CDN deals with your CDN dilemma
The most common case of using P2P CDN is to turn it on at the same time with the external CDNs to relocate traffic to peering network and decrease traffic consumption from the external CDN. By doing so, a broadcaster usually saves the budget as P2P CDN prices are at least 2Х lower of traditional CDN prices. However, P2P CDN offers much more than that.
Let’s consider what P2P CDN can do for in-house CDN. When in-house CDN is already established, the costs of its maintenance are usually considered as “fixed monthly costs” that broadcaster must carry anyway. For in-house CDN to be cost-effective, the traffic must be stable 80% of the time. In this case, turning P2P on for users that are connected to in-house CDN seems like the nonsense idea. Why decrease the traffic on in-house CDN by relocating it to the P2P network, if the in-house traffic is already “prepaid.”
Let’s take a closer look at how the switch from in-house to external CDN is happening.
While the size of the audience is relatively small, and the capacity of in-house CDN is enough to serve them all, every new viewer is usually connected to in-house CDN. When a number of viewers reach a certain threshold, all new users are directed by the load balancing system to some of the external CDN. This is the moment when a broadcaster starts to pay “extra costs” on top of his in-house СDN expenses. This is quite obvious, and there’s no way you change the rules of the game? Or there is a way?
Teleport Media changes the perception of your in-house CDN capabilities
Imagine that all users connected to in-house CDN start to download and upload video chunks from/to P2P CDN rather than download it from your in-house CDN. It decreases traffic consumption, so you can add more users to the same in-house servers.
The more traffic is relocated to P2P CDN, the less is retrieved from in-house CDN, so it has the free capacity, meaning you can add more viewers.
On average, it is possible to relocate up to 80% of the traffic to the P2P network, so only 1/5 of all video chunks will be requested from in-house CDN. If you expect your infrastructure to handle 100'000 concurrent viewers and that each of them downloads 10 chunks a minute, then turning them to P2P CDN let each of them download only 2 chunks a minute, so you can populate your CDN with 500'000 concurrent viewers.
Smart API Fivefold Effect
For our customers, we have turned this idea into a working tool — the Smart API. Even when the capacity of the in-house CDN is enough to serve the whole traffic and all viewers requests, and when the external CDN is not required, each of the viewers actively establishes connections to other peers. Thanks to that, P2P CDN is “warming up” without video chunks transferred, and a broadcaster is not charged for this. And when in-house CDN traffic threshold approaches, instead of switching to the external CDN, P2P CDN steps in and fill the gap, automagically.
Just imagine it. Working as your in-house CDN multiplier, Teleport Media P2P CDN gives you more of your in-house infrastructure right at the point when the load balancer is ready to connect viewers to the external CDN. You push far back the threshold at which you have to access the external CDN.
Our Smart API available for broadcasters in two modes:
#1 As the tool for those broadcasters who want to maintain own logic of P2P CDN management of any complexity
#2 As the service when Teleport Media applies its own logic of P2P management, and the broadcaster gets the end result
So if you think you have 100 Gbps in-house CDN (put you numbers here), we’ve got great news — you actually have 5Х times bigger in-house CDN.
We encourage you to try it today!
Get connected to release the full potential of your in-house CDN try@teleport.media.
