Optimizing Content Delivery Network Design

Building Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs, requires distributed, localized collections of compute, memory and storage.  CDNs are built out of groups of servers at a variety of locations with various tiers and types of caches. Modern CDN caches present a huge array of variable configurations. By modularly simulating the components into building blocks, we show how you can quickly try many different sets of configurations.  This modularity also allows plugging in alternative or proprietary components to measure their impact on the overall system cost and performance.  These simulations can be built in days or weeks, instead of the months to years needed to build and test live systems. This session walks through the process of simulating specific CDN configurations. We demonstrate how modular components are swapped and show the simulated performance of different variations. We also demonstrate how to use real-world CDN traces to build realistic scenarios and how the results of the analysis are graphically presented.