Why Use MultiCDN Cedexis

© 2016 Cedexis. All rights reserved.

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BEST PRACTICES:

Part of the Cedexis CDN Maturity Series

In a world where outages are the norm, fast and reliable applications need complete coverage.

Making the Case for Multi-CDN Delivery

http://www.cedexis.com


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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This eBook will showcase real world use cases to

demonstrate the benefits of multi-CDN delivery for

companies focused on optimizing web performance.

Cedexis is dedicated to developing multi-CDN strategies

and solutions for content and application delivery. Our

clients are global retail, media, and technology companies

that leverage Cedexis’ expertise and tools—creating the

best possible performance for their users worldwide.

Cedexis is constantly measuring real-time performance

across all major clouds and CDNs as they are seen by

billions of end users behind over 38,000 ISP networks in

every country in the world.

In this eBook, we share our perspective on how a multi-

CDN strategy can optimize performance of content

and application delivery platforms, based on real results

produced for our clients.



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THE X SECOND RULE:Engaging with Audience’s Ever Increasing Expectation

Over the past decade, we’ve seen the ‘eight-second rule’ – meaning users would abandon sites taking longer than 8 seconds to download – get slashed to four seconds and then two.1

1“Maximizing Audience Engagement” Akamai, January 2015

Audiences have always dropped off when content delivery is slow.

Studies of ecommerce and video have proven that the longer it takes

for the screen to completely render, the more people close the browser

and move on to another enterprise.

We can’t call it “The 8 Second Rule” anymore. It keeps changing. Let’s call it “The X Second Rule.”


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FEELING ABANDONED: VIDEO VIEWERSHIPVideos are a great proof point of viewer abandonment, offering significant metrics.

We don’t need to restate the obvious. Information from Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Mozilla prove over and over that Internet users stick with high performance sites and abandon slow sites.

Metric Outcome

eCommerce Shopping cart performance More completed purchases

Content Quicker load timesMore reads, more views, more social shares

Applications Faster downloadsMore installs, more use, more clients

Every Internet business model has proven case studies of how performance increases business goals.

Business Benefits of CDNs



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THE CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK: RAISING THE BAR

With even small delays, lasting only 1% of the total length of the video, viewers watched 5% less video.2

2“Maximizing Audience Engagement” Akamai, January 2015

DevOps needs to find ways to provide even more reliable, faster,

application delivery.

One massive innovation is the content delivery network (CDN). These

services store the more static assets in high-performance data centers

that are strategically located to get assets to the end client as speedily

as possible.

These days, any service serious about delivering high quality to

large audiences must either utilize a CDN service or implement its

own solution. A CDN caches the most

requested objects of an

application closer to the client.



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THE CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK: NOBODY’S PERFECT

Nobody is perfect, and no one is perfect for everyone. CDNs strive for perfect uptime,

but they can’t accomplish it. In addition, different

geographic regions are better served by one CDN

or another.

• Outages (which do happen) will damage

audience response.

• The service starts gaining popularity in a

region that the CDN does not have great

performance.

• The CDN becomes a critical part of the

business, and the business would like to have

some leverage to negotiate terms.

As audience expectations increase and as services achieve a global reach, relying on one CDN creates weaknesses.



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DISTRIBUTE RESPONSIBILITYA multi-CDN configuration can help

maximize content delivery or application

performance even in the face of surging

traffic—deploying assets on several

CDNs at one time. This promotes

the best possible performance, helps

ensure 100% uptime, reduces costs, and

leverages regionally dominant CDNs.


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MAXIMIZE THE EFFECT

With a variety of options, the multiple CDNs need to be managed in a way that wrests the best value from them.

Different approaches to managing

traffic among multiple CDNs exist,

among them:

FAILOVERROUND ROBIN

GEOGRAPHICPERFORMANCE-BASED



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OPTIMIZING LOAD BALANCINGSource. Cache hits. ASNs, ISPs. With so many elements between the request and the fulfillment of a

service, maximizing delivery and maximizing the multi-CDN investment must use the best information.

Real User Measurements

Cedexis Real User Measurements (RUM) direct Openmix for intelligent, real time load balancing

that optimizes asset delivery for each individual client.

Cedexis Openmix makes tens of millions of unique decisions a day to route traffic to the best performing CDN. Openmix reduces cost, ensures availability, and maximizes key performance indicators (KPIs) that shape the user experience. All of those critical decisions are made using information collected in real time by Cedexis Radar.

Cedexis Openmix is a next-generation, data-driven global traffic management (GTM) system that routes content delivery from over 80 points of presence (PoPs) worldwide. By continuously monitoring and scoring public and private CDNs, clouds, and data centers globally from the perspective of hundreds of millions of real-time users, Openmix provides the premiere platform for optimizing performance across multiple delivery channels all over the world.

Cedexis Radar analyzes data from real end users—providing the most unbiased source of data for evaluating Cloud and CDNs. With a pool of over 5 billion measurements per day, Cedexis provides the world’s most accurate cloud and CDN metrics.

Optimal Routing and Load Balancing: Maximize the Multi-CDN

Investment

The Role of

Cedexis Openmix

The Role of

Cedexis Radar


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INCREASING VIDEO PERFORMANCE WITH A MULTI CDN STRATEGY

We’ve seen a 65% decrease in buffering incidents since deploying Cedexis Openmix. These quality of service improvements deliver better quality to the end user, resulting in incredibly low viewer abandonment rates.

— Manik Bambha, Chief Digital Officer and CTO, ViewLift

http://www.cedexis.com/blog/focus-on-video-the-evidence-for-how-cedexis-improves-your-online-video-performance/


http://www.cedexis.com/blog/focus-on-video-the-evidence-for-how-cedexis-improves-your-online-video-performance/


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PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY FOR THE GLOBAL GAMING EXPERIENCE

ROBLOX is one of the largest user-generated online gaming

platforms operating today, maintaining over 15 million active

games created by users. With that success comes a challenge;

users across the globe expect a smooth, positive online gaming experience. That expectation

translates into pressure on developers and publishers of MMORPGs to effectively manage and

predict consumer traffic.

Using Cedexis Openmix, ROBLOX delivers best-in-class performance, 100 percent content availability, and dynamic control of the gaming platform. Here’s how:

• Cedexis routes around single CDN outages and reduced performance issues, providing

clients the best resource at the time of a request.

• Cedexis offers a more flexible load balancing strategy, based on providers’ current

performance. If a source is unavailable, Cedexis quickly directs traffic to another source.

If a route is slow, Cedexis points clients to the better option.

• ROBLOX maintains complete control over content delivery through use of the

Cedexis platform.

By federating asset delivery across multiple CDN providers we were able to leverage regional strengths of the individual providers, have automatic failover should a provider experience an outage, and most importantly, improve speed of delivery to our end users.

—Jared Shapiro, CEO Roblox


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SCALABILITY: BE READY WHEN DEMAND SPIKES

Moving to a multi-CDN approach will

create the foundation needed to provide

a better experience for users. Cedexis

Openmix and Radar help make managing

multiple CDNs easier while delivering the

quality users expect.

Cedexis Openmix implements multi-

CDN deployment successfully, making

decisions on how to route users to the

best-performing CDN.

Why Multi-CDN Makes Sense Using a multi-CDN approach:

PBS provides reliable on-demand video

for audiences numbering in the hundreds

of millions—no matter where or when

they watch.

High-traffic Premier Weeks are successful

for all their viewers. PBS serves an average

of 428 million video views per month

across all devices—83 percent of which

are delivered to a mobile platform.

Multi-CDN Approach

Ensures Quality User

Experience at PBS

A single CDN approach has its limits.

Whether you deliver a

premiere gaming experience,

maintain a high-traffic

ecommerce platform, or stream

over-the-top (OTT) video, one

CDN means accepting outages and

performance limitations.


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PRICING LEVERAGE AND GROWTH PLANNING: THE GIFT OF CONFIDENCE

By adopting a multi-CDN approach, businesses are better positioned to negotiate CDN rates. CDN providers, like all companies, want to maximize their value

by resisting price reductions. CDN transit rates for new contracts have been declining 15-

25% per year, according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com. It makes sense to use

multiple CDNs.

With multiple, high-performing CDNs available, content providers can deliver a premier

user experience more cost-effectively.

With Cedexis Openmix we automated real time load balancing between multiple CDNs. Page load times improved by 60% in China, dropping from 18 seconds down to 6 seconds.

—Eric Wyttynck, Director of Sales, Accor S.A.

Customer Case Study

60%50%25%

Improvement in China

In the US, Brazil, Thailand

Overall global improvement

Cedexis provides

the data to handle

growth confidently,

by adding the best service for the region, load,

and audience.

Accor S. A., the world’s sixth largest hotel group,

used Cedexis to plan and deploy new CDNs that

optimized their service in critical growth regions.


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AVAILABILITY: ONLINE STORES ARE ALWAYS OPEN

No matter how impressive a CDN’s service might be, no single provider can deliver 100 percent uptime. And that’s just not good enough, especially for online retailers.

Because a delivery interruption from a single

digital asset can slow page load speeds,

service needs to be fast and highly available.

An online retailer’s biggest nightmare is a

service outage, and that’s precisely what a

multi-CDN approach strives to avoid. Failover

CDNs perform too slowly for even moderate

traffic ecommerce.

Openmix enables federation of multiple CDNs as active-

active peers—making complete availability achievable. Openmix uses

performance-based multi-CDN load balancing—the ability to leverage real user measurements

(RUM) to make traffic-routing decisions.

When you buy online, you are really buying from an image. If there’s no image delivered, you’ve got nothing to drive sales.

— Rory Dennis, Founder, GM North America for Amplience


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AVAILABILITY: ONLINE STORES ARE ALWAYS OPEN (Continued)

One of the reasons we need Cedexis is that no CDN offers you 100 percent uptime for real. Multi-CDN managed with Cedexis Openmix enabled our 99.99 percent SLA.

— Rory Dennis


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No single CDN can realistically provide 100 percent availability. However, by intelligently balancing content delivery among multiple CDNs, availability can approach 100 percent.



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MANAGEMENT SIMPLICITY: FINDING THE BEST PERFORMING CDN AUTOMATICALLY

Put Multi-CDN Management on Auto-Pilot

Cedexis Openmix automatically manages load balancing

between multiple CDNs using billions of measurements

a day to determine which CDN will perform the best for

each request. The RUM measurements that drive Openmix

come from Cedexis Radar, a service that collects billions

of metrics every day from public clouds, public CDNs, and

private data centers. This ensures a user request is always

delivered from the best performing CDN for that user.

Easy to deploy and simple to use, the

Cedexis Openmix solution is completely

scriptable, allowing it to make decisions

based on logic as simple or complex as

the situation demands, while remaining

very simple to deploy as a JavaScript app

with many prefabricated open source

apps available.

The deployment is simple and straightforward. I rolled out one property with some help from my Cedexis team and then did the rest on my own. We plan to add more CDNs to ensure even better performance for every region that our viewers hail from.

— Manik Bambha, CTO at SnagFilms


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RELIABILITY, PERFORMANCE, AND COST:BEATING EXPECTATIONS

Simply put, multiple CDNs perform better than a single CDN. This strategy improves performance, reduces costs, and promotes ease of management.

To learn more about selecting and executing the right Multi-CDN

strategy for you, read the next two papers in our series:

Link to Select 1st

Link to How to Select

Single vs. Multiple CDN Comparison

Throughout the world, multi-CDN strategies

improve performance.

*Actual customer results


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Challenge Cedexis Delivers Case Study

Increase performance

Decrease buffering

Speed startup

Increase user base

View Lift

Gaming experience

User experience unaffected by single resource outages

Load balancing optimized for business and performance criteria

Infrastructure readied for surges in popularity

Roblox

Scaling and growth

Know CDN performance for region, end device, and ISP

Define CDN usage by any criteria

Negotiate with service providers

Add the ideal resource for any growth scenario

PBS

Accor

Availability

Redirection away from outages and low-performing resources

Dynamic, automatic, with no administrator intervention

Users experience the most reliable service possible

Amplience

Simplified management

JavaScript deployment

Prebuilt scripts available

Ideal service and uptime without round the clock attention

Yves Rocher

CEDEXIS: CONTENT PROVIDER’S BEST FRIEND


http://go.cedexis.com/CaseStudyViewLift-TY.html

http://go.cedexis.com/CaseStudyROBLOX-TY.html

http://go.cedexis.com/CaseStudyPBS-TY.html

http://go.cedexis.com/Case-Study-Accor-TY.html

http://go.cedexis.com/Case-Study-Amplience-TY.html

http://go.cedexis.com/Case-Study-Yves-Rocher-TY.html


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www.cedexis.com

Founded in 2009, Cedexis

optimizes Web performance

across data centers, content

delivery networks (CDNs)

and clouds, for companies

that want to ensure 100%

availability and extend their

reach to new global markets.

Portland, Oregon421 SW 6th Ave, Suite 700Portland, OR 97204+1 855 CEDEXIS (233-3947)

Paris, France27 rue Raymond Lefebvre94250 Gentilly, France+33 (0)1 79 755 253



Why Use MultiCDN Cedexis

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