Agile Content - ACD CDN Management & Orchestration
Category Streaming
The video CDN landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented due to new technologies and deployment options in the market.During the last few years, a big trend emerged, to build TV streaming infrastructures based on standard web caches. These are relatively cheap commodity products, using standard hardware. But as video QoE is getting increasingly important, and new business models / standards like Open Cache and Mobile Edge impact delivery, standard web caches alone are not able to handle the demands of a next-generation streaming network. Standard web caches are independent nodes, but the delivery of a reliable TV or video service requires coordination and management of a network of nodes.
Many organizations who have built custom management layers to create a CDN out of standard web caches have realized that it can be very complex, costly, and time-consuming.As an alternative, many operators are embracing partnerships with major cloud providers. They are even building entire 5G core networks with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. The real shift we’re seeing now is that these “clouds” are being located as close to the network edge as possible. This is leading telecom operators like Verizon and AT&T to build out networks with cloud capabilities close to the edge and sometimes even network applications. In fact, this approach could change the entire concept of what a CDN is.
If the network is in the cloud, the CDN also must become a cloud application. As a result, the CDN is designed not by how you place services – as is the traditional approach – but by how you orchestrate caching and delivery applications.The bottom line is, that regardless of which strategy is being used, CDN management and orchestration are key.Agile Content Delivery (ACD) offers powerful and cost-efficient CDN management and orchestration that is cache agnostic and can manage both private, cloud, and hybrid CDNs as well as optimize them for high-quality video delivery, overcoming the cost and complexities associated with building custom management solutions.ACD manages the complexity within the CDN (intra CDN), natively supporting multiple streaming use cases such as live, VOD and HTTP streaming. It has a cache-agnostic high-performance streaming CDN router for load balancing and QoE management.
In addition, it supports offloading to third-party CDNs to handle peak loads, for example during popular live sports events. It can also manage and control the delivery from multiple CDN vendors (inter CDN). ACD makes it possible to select a CDN, a PoP, or a streaming server based on QoE. It can even switch seamlessly between these sources in real-time during an ongoing session, which means that if a failure occurs, the client will be instantly redirected to another server, PoP or CDN without even noticing any drop in quality.
Key Features
• Network-aware orchestration of caches meaning caches can be created in cloud/virtual environments where they are needed when they are needed and torn down when resources can be freed up•Seamless “in-stream” switching from one cache/pop to the other
• Seamless “in-stream” offloading to 3rd party CDN services
• Works with Agile Cache or leading 3rd party caches•API-based, open, and integration-friendly facilitating automation
