The Cloud is everywhere these days. With the quick rise of Cloud Computing solutions in 2013, it seems that every IT company around the world is in the process of bringing their own Cloud offering to the table. Both virtually and physically, the Cloud is everywhere.
With the rise of Cloud hosting solutions in 2013, companies from around the world are now offering Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud services. From a physical geographic standpoint, this means the world is now being embedded with pockets of Cloud offerings within different geographical locations.
Put that aside for a moment.
Let’s assume you are a Cloud consumer who lives outside of Prague. After reading Cloud provider reviews, you decide to invest in a Cloud company based in Silicon Valley. From that Cloud provider, you purchase a Linux Xen based Cloud server with 10GB of Memory (RAM), 100GB of Disk Storage, 8 CPU Cores and 14TB of Bandwidth which you plan to use for hosting your ecommerce platform.
Now the question, with your physical location in Prague and the physical location of your Cloud provider halfway around the world in California, what are you expectations when it comes to content lag time? What are your expectations in terms of how quickly your content will load locally? And what is your expectation for how quickly your website will load for consumers in and around your physical location?
Distribution through CDN’s
By this point in time, you most likely already know what a CDN, or content distribution network, is. A CDN acts to pool content in servers closer to various geographic locations enabling that content to be accessed at a much quicker speed. Ex. If you live in Los Angeles, CA however you want to access a blog based in Hong Kong, instead of pulling that content from the Hong Kong based server where the content is stored, CDN’s allow you to pull that content from a server in Phoenix, AZ. This means you receive the content quicker. It also means the blogging company receives a more steady flow of traffic from international locations due to their content loading at a quicker pace.
This said, how do CDN’s play into the rise of Geo Clouds?
Edge Servers and Cloud Storage
By combining CDN’s with the Cloud, content is distributed much faster and with much less load on the hosting company allowing for greater traffic. The process works like this:
- A web visitor lands on your site (blog, ecommerce platform, company site etc.) and requests data (files) stored in the closest edge server.
- Once the request is confirmed, the edge server in question supplies a local cached copy of the file or it pulls the content from a local Cloud storage server connected to the original server.
- To ensure quick delivery of the content, the CDN in question defines the TTL (Time-to-Live). Once the TTL runs out, an additional request for the content is sent. This request begins the process anew.
- Finally, the requested content is cached once more by the edge servers. The time-to-live begins anew.
Essentially edge servers matched with Cloud storage allow for content to be served around the world at a quicker pace while also ensuring servers of content origin aren’t overrun with incoming traffic and requests for files. In terms of Geo Clouds, CDN’s make sense for this exact reason: speeding up content without taking on a tremendous load.
Coming full circle, with the Cloud and Cloud storage solutions dominating the IT world in 2013, it would follow that 2014 might be the year of Geo Clouds and CDN’s.