CDN Breakthroughs

"Jet-Stream, pioneering federation, is a strong supporter of standards and has been involved in ETSI and IETF efforts to standardize interconnectivity between CDNs. In a utopian world, all CDNs support common open and free standards to interconnect, and the standards support all advanced features between CDNs. However, realistically we can only conclude that CDN interconnection efforts so far have not procuded any real-world implementations -let alone operational usage- after many years. Running pilots only show that the lowest possible common denominator has been standardized. The costs for CDN vendors and CDN operators to implement these standards can rise very high. Everyone has to rewrite large portions of their code and redesign their architectures. In addition, the pace of the industry is killing. New technologies and business opportunities emerge every few months, and standards will simply keep lagging for years. The business case for CDN federation has already been calculated to be weak, and the need for CDN interconnection has been undercut by the availability of software CDNs that can be extended in hours to cloud and virtual footprints all over the world very fast at low costs and with the full feature stack of your own CDN. Another serious threat is that vendors are trying to get specific innovations into standards, locking the standards into proprietary and expensive (and already outdated) patented technologies. We need a faster, more flexible, more open, more pragmatic approach.