We talked to US CDN policy manager Cedexis at the TV Connect show and although there are many performance management tools out there for managing CDNs, we’re not sure there are any others quite like this.
It began life working for major web sites such as Linkedin, Cartier and Microsoft and is making the shift to video assets now. It already has a deal with Nordic OTT video service Viaplay. What Cedexis does is compile usage statistics on each CDN and then manages dynamic switching between them, even mid video-stream, from one CDN to another which will perform better. It can do the same for any source of traffic and can just as easily shift delivery from one cloud provider to another, as one CDN player to another.
We talked to UK Cedexis account exec Zac McLeod who told us, “We use a software probing agent to measure three things, response times or latency; throughput and availability. And we advise our partners to work with at least 3 CDNs and switch dynamically between them.”
“Many video owners have one CDN for VoD and another for Live, but we tell them they can have multiple CDNs for all of their functions and instead of switching by function, switch by performance.”
The company was formed by some ex-Akamai guys and is based on the fact that there is no CDN that is doing the best for everyone at the same time. In some parts of the world, a different CDN might be able to do better at that moment in time, or do the same job cheaper. Cedexis reminded us that there are 50,000 ISPs globally which traffic can be passing through.
“This is not just load balancing,” Said McLeod, “You might make your first priority to find the cheapest path at a given performance level, or you may simply want to avoid micro-outages, or where you have contracts which are running close to their contractual limit and you want to avoid overages. We can tune it to do all or any of these.”
The raw logs can then be provided back to the CDN partners, and companies like Akamai has become a Cedexis customer because it alerts Akamai to weaknesses in its own CDN. Of course the very act of switching from a single CDN provider to say three, is likely to the incumbent offering a steep discount, just in order to keep the customer on the books and McLeod confessed that this was sometimes a motive to get started with Cedexis.