Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) today

Did you know that +70% of internet content today is delivered through #ContentDeliveryNetworks (#CDNs)? 

First set up 25 years ago to speed up the webpage loading it is using a network of distributed servers (Points of Presence) that store cached data closer to the website's /application's user. By doing that we have reduced the round trips to the origin servers as well as amount of requests on these servers. 

The infrastructure CDNs use is staggering in terms of its distribution e.g. Cloudflare lists on blog.cloudflare having PoPs in 330 cities and 120 countries.

There are public CDNs with Akamai, Fastly & Cloudflare being one of the oldest and better known, while some content providers such as Netflix have their own private CDNs. 

Famously, first in 2019 CDN industry made headlines due to several high profile outages of seemingly unrelated websites going down at the same time. This put the spotlight on the initial over-reliance of the worldwide internet traffic on quite few CDNs and resulted in a more robust multi-CDN solutions going forward. 

✳️ CDN business today ✳️ 

CDNs business today is based on 3 pillars: 

💈 Delivery of the content which was the initial “raison d’etre” of the CDNs, now becoming more and more commoditised 

💈 Security related services: DDoS protection that became increasingly CDN growing business 

💈 Cloud computing services e.g. Linode services at Akamai 

✳️ So how is the CDN industry doing today? ✳️ 

Consolidation in the industry is definitely a thing:

🛑Edgio filed for chapter 11 September 2024

🛑Stackpath announced its closure 14 June 2024

🛑Lumen divested its CDN assets selling them to Akamai 10 October 2023

Current content traffic growth is not showing the spectacular increases seen during pandemic and post- pandemic period – and understandably so. Also, it seems that some players have been relying on non-organic growth and incurred heavy debt they could not sustain. Without the dynamic growth of the content traffic or new streams of revenue to balance out the delivery portfolio the margins became thinner and weaker players had to exit the market. 

✳️ Opportunity ahead ✳️ 

There is a big opportunity in front of the CDN industry as more data is being transmitted via CDNs today than at any other point in history. 

Many players are looking at the recent trends that will require an even more resilient and distributed network of CDNs such to handle AI driven traffic or VR development. Experts are seeing the recent events as a recalibration of the market - making the remaining CDNs stronger, and inviting innovation for those that want to lead the pack for new revenue streams. 

Did you know that most of your streaming data comes from a nearby datacentre that houses CDN servers?

#ContentDeliveryNetworks #cacheddata #CDNs #AIOpportunities