Episode 51: Delivering Content: CDN Deep Dive
Content is everywhere in today's world! It doesn't magically just show up on your favorite streaming device, it's pumped through something called Content Delivery Networks or CDNs. This week Alex gives us a glimpse of what a CDN is, its purpose, and how our favorite shows get in the palm of our hands!
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Pat: 0:31
Hey everybody. Welcome back to this week's edition of Breaking Down the Bites. As usual, I'm your host, pat. You can find me on Twitter at layer eight packet. That's the number eight. Kyle's here too. He's on Twitter as well at Dan 2 56. You can find the show on Twitter at breaking bites. Pod we're pretty active on Twitter, so come say hello. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe to your streaming platform of choice. We are back for another week. The three amigos are here, ready to roll, ready to get pretty nerdy. Is this topic, this week's topic is gonna be awesome in my opinion. So, what's up Kyle? What's going on man?
Kyle: 1:09
Super excited. This is gonna be great. Another, another wonderful. Pennsylvania Day. There's the weather for you,
Pat: 1:15
Thank you. I appreciate it. I was looking forward to that. I really was. It was cold today, man. It really was,
Kyle: 1:22
Yeah, it's gross.
Pat: 1:24
out there. I went to St. Patty State Parade. for those of you that know, know me or just know me virtually, my, my Pops has been playing the bag prize for like 20 years and he actually started when we were in college, Kyle. It was, it was funny. They, they ushered in a new president at the college we were at and they actually hired a piper to play like the ceremony or whatever. And my dad thought that was pretty cool. And he picked up pipes and he's been playing ever since. So he is going on 20 years of playing, playing the old pipes, which only has eight notes by the way. For those of you that are willing for a fun fact that the bagpipes only have eight notes. So anyway, so yeah, we went to see him today, play, St. Patty's Day parade, and we took the grandkids and it was really cold out there, but, but we did it and we made it so it was all good. But it was, it was pretty wick. It was like f like 15 with the windchill. It was pretty crazy. So not a good time. Alex. You have warmer weather where you're at, out there, you don't get, you don't get very cold. cold. nights out there, eh,
Alex: 2:26
Nah, it's gonna be, there's gonna be a few days in the low sixties this week. Spa colds gets
Pat: 2:33
River
Kyle: 2:35
Sounds terrible.
Pat: 2:37
This is awful. no. So we are back this week. We appreciate everybody joining as usual. Just a couple of housekeeping items before we get into the nerdy stuff. Last week I talked about the Cisco Champions Radio podcast that was released, or that I should say that I did, with them on the Catalyst 95. X series, that was actually released last week. So they were much quicker than I thought they would be with the release of that episode, depending on where, that one fell in the schedule. So, that is out there now. Go check that out. Cisco Champions Radio, 9,500 x. also a link. To the podcast will be in the show notes for this week. So, to make it easy for y'all to find it and, go from there. So that's, one item. The next item is, we didn't realize it at the time, but last week was our 50th episode, the Big Five. Oh gentlemen. That was, that's some sort of a mini milestone, I think. Wouldn't you say?
Alex: 3:30
right. I wish I had like one of those party blows. Yeah.
Pat: 3:35
we need, we need sound effects on this show. Maybe that's in the next budget. I don't know. We'll see.
Alex: 3:40
Mm-hmm.
Kyle: 3:40
you go.
Pat: 3:41
Yeah, so the big 50. So thanks everybody for tuning in with us. So everyone that's made this show possible guests. Listeners, you guys as co-hosts, my man Dean who originally started it with me, so, he's a big part of this as well, even though he's not with us anymore. So just a big thanks to everybody. We made to, we made it to 50, so we're gonna keep going until people tell us to stop. So, they're like, oh my God, we wish those guys would just shut up already. If that happens, just, just tweet at us and tell us the, the, the no, no hard feelings. Last one for us is I, I attended a event last week with our good friend Nikki Townson, who she was on the show, a while back. She has a nonprofit called Tech Aware, which basically, helps women. Get into the tech fields, or business in general. So she does a lot of things with like LinkedIn headshots and resume, pointers and basically just exposing women and connecting women to all these, bunch of places and sponsors and, things of that nature. she had their, tech wear had their big. Event last week at the Microsoft campus in Malvern, Pennsylvania. So, I literally, one of our offices is right up the road, literally less than two miles. So I worked down there for today and, shot down the road and, and went to support her. And let me tell you, it was. Packed. It was just people everywhere. And, so she's doing really big things over there. Her and her team over at Tech Aware. So Go Tech, go check them out. Their link will be in the show notes there as well. I think it's techaware.tech is their website. So if you're a, a woman out there looking to make connections with our other, Women in business and trying to get into tech. Certainly check them out and they have a whole bunch of resources there. So shout out to Nikki and her crew for putting on that, that event. That was some, that was really, really something to see. So, just a couple of notes there for this week. House cleaning before we get onto the nerdy stuff. So, and now the nerdy stuff, ladies and gents, here we go. We need a soundboard. A sound transition would've been good right there, but we digress. This week we are doing a c d N Deep Dive Content delivery networks. So, Alex, you are gonna drive this one, or I should say the majority of it. We're gonna pop in questions and have a decent discussion on where we fall short. We, as in Kyle and I fall short with the cdn, technologies and, and whatnot. Yeah, cdn, this week's gonna be a really good one. See if we can kind of get going and if anybody sees any smoke out their window, that's, that's this podcast thinking and collectively coming together and trying to make a mess of this. So we'll see what happens. So, Alex, you wanna take it away, my friend, and go from there.
Alex: 6:21
Sure thing. So yeah, there's another one that we talked about for a bit, and now that I have a few months, well actually it's almost a year at this point, at Disney streaming, I have some insider info. And even though I felt like I knew the technology pretty well before, I certainly feel like I know it pretty well now. So just like last time, it's similar to the Azure. Podcast that we had a little bit ago. It'll be a deep dive. Probably won't be quite as technical as yours was but we'll see how it goes. First thing I wanted to do was just high level overview of what CDN someone is listening to this, I would imagine you have a little bit of background maybe, maybe not So just like it sounds CDN Content Delivery Network, it's a whole idea is it's a network and it's and only purpose is delivering content. To the end user, which seems pretty straightforward, but I mean, ultimately that that's what it is. And I mean, it can't be anything. It could be, it could be a podcast if it really wanted to. It could be just a web server traffic. But I think we're gonna focus on video streaming cuz don't have the stats to back it up, But I'm gonna assume that 90% of the traffic Traversing CDNs is related to it the sudden just massive increase in the streaming players out there. I mean, what started as being like a a Netflix thing is now, at this point, I'm kind of shocked if some random network doesn't have their own streaming variant, whether it be, discovery Paramount, cvs, you name it, they all have one now. But obviously there's some giants in the room. Netflix, Certainly Hulu and Disney, which is what I'm familiar with. And then some other big players like Apple. So yeah, like I said, we'll focus on CDNs as it relates to transition into talking about streaming and not related to cdn, but starting with that with CDNs and we'll, we'll just use Disney here. The concept of a cdm right now is there's so much storage that's involved with storing all this stuff So, I mean, you think about Netflix and Disney's catalog of content, it it's enormous. I mean the, the terabytes and whatever comes out, the petabytes, of storage needed for,
Pat: 8:50
Yeah.
Alex: 8:51
right. And the whole idea is there's all this content you want to get it to people across the. and you wanna be for performance reasons. You wanna be as close to those end people, end users as you can. But it, it's not realistic to take all that massive amount of storage and put it 60 places in the world. It's just doesn't make financial sense. But it also doesn't make sense that you have everyone in the world trying to watch stranger things and maybe there's just one server in, Las Vegas. Los Angeles that serves that content for the rest of the world. So that's kind of where CDNs come right in. It's getting as close to the p as possible as you can to the end user at a price that makes sense. And the way they do that is kind of how you architect CDNs. You have the concept of an origin site. that's going to have all the storage. It, it's gonna every single catalog, every, everything from the newest episode of Stranger Things to, I don't know, some off the wall, like whatever you can think of is. Use your imagination. Whatever you may think of that's not popular. All that's stored in these orange origin sites and without. Going into too much detail and saying anything that I'm not allowed to say about Disney, it, it's universal. Across all these streaming giants, they're going to have probably less than five of these in the whole world less than 10 certainly. And I think Netflix has three. That's public knowledge. So the idea is all their data. You need redundancy. You can't have a a site go offline. You lose some content, but you don't need many. So we'll just assume five or and the other thing worth noting is that storage, there's not all storage is treated the same. You have storage that's better used for writing and deleting or racing content and putting new content really quick. and, dynamic content, content is gonna be there one day, gone the next, or maybe even here, one hour gone the next hour. Then you have storage that isn't as good with that. It's, it's meant to store it and stay there and you can get to it, but it's a little slower, but you can hold more so that you can think of your origin site as that's gonna be the massive amounts of storage as far as like just size. but that's going to be the IO or as fast as it can read and write is gonna be much slower than what you're gonna have at the Edge sites. Where the edge sites are gonna be the exact opposite. You're gonna have much less storage, but they can pull and retrieve content and send content much faster than other storage. And those are the two extremes. The very edge site where this is where actually the users are getting content and the origin site. all the content lives. I think Netflix does the exact same thing in most streaming providers. It's also sometimes a, middleman as well. So you might have the concept of an origin site that might only be, two continents in the world, two, three places in the world. You might have something like a mid-tier or mid site data center, and that might hold, say, 50% of the content. And then you'll have edge sites with that might legitimately only hold 5% of all the entire catalog. But the thing that that makes that work is that 5% of the content which can be stored on these edge caching nodes cdn, that might legitimately constitute 95% of all the traffic.
Pat: 12:32
Wow.
Alex: 12:32
Like you get the, the, the Netflix top 10 sites or top 10 shows, top 10 movies.
Pat: 12:38
Yep.
Alex: 12:39
And even extrapolate that back cuz there's so much content. Let's say the top 50, you take the top 50, that might only be 5% of the, of their entire catalog cuz they have thousands of things on their catalog.
Pat: 12:51
Right, right.
Alex: 12:52
But you take those top 50 and you put 'em on the caching node. And that might, like I said, service 95% of all the. So you need to be able to access content when you need to. But the fact is, is that these cashing nodes with a very limited amount of storage and can write data and delete data very quickly. They're kind of like constantly out there with just the the most popular content. ultimately that's how they get away with. Lot more sites, they can get close to the customers because they just don't need data centers full of storage. You can have a few devices. And I think what some people don't realize is an origin site, which I said has all the content that might be an entire data center, floors full of equipment where. An Edge site, they might just any of these streaming providers, they might just go into a data center provider and say, I need two racks and just, you can put it anywhere. So your cost to entry so quick, just turning up. You can do these so quickly cuz you're not bringing up this massive forklift of just storage after storage. And the other thing that worth noting is that generally all the processing that's done, when the content originally comes in, there's things that need to happen. If there's commercials need to be put in. If there's different bit rates like hd, 4k, so on and so on, all that stuff can happen in the OR origin data centers. So anything that goes into giving you the final product that could be done at the origin site, no need for that to be in the Edge sites. The Edge sites. are really just. again, CDN Content delivery. Those edge sites, which is the content delivery network, they are just there so people can reach the content and pull it. We're not, it's not processing it, it's not putting a bow on it, making it look pretty. It's not responsible for giving you the thumbnails when you're searching through the, your catalog on Netflix or Disney plus it. ,it's just there. It's giving you the raw data. So I kind of, yeah. So I kind of stopped there, let you guys ask any questions cause I didn't wanna have that be 10 minutes of discussion without giving you a chance to digest what I just said, So, yeah. Is there anything there that didn't make sense or was you didn't realize was the case?
Kyle: 15:13
I guess with the the, caching part of it, is that just based on the amount of hits or is there some sort of like predictive thing that happens there?
Alex: 15:22
Yeah. it'd be actually a good topic to actually get somebody that works in that department and know for sure, but there's definitely, they're the heavy hitter shows. just using Disney Plus as an example, if the new episode of the Mandalorian comes out, That'll get preloaded into all the Cashs, even before we have any metrics to say that people are gonna hit it just because they know it's gonna happen.
Kyle: 15:41
Oh,
Pat: 15:41
Sure.
Alex: 15:42
we'll say, Hey, it's launching on Friday. We'll proactively start jobs where, the origin sites will start sending it to all CDNs so the CDNs have it ready. But if there's a show that maybe just kind of took people by surprise yeah, there's metrics that are involved with that saying, Hey, this is getting hit pretty heavily. And it's also not. a thing where we just have to send it out to all CDNs too. So again, you might have, like I said, three or four origin sites. You could have 50 edge sites or a hundred edge sites, and depending on the content too, you may only send it to a certain region. A good example would just be like, if you have a, an Italian language movie, I mean, it's probably not be quite as popular here in the United States, but an Italian Edge site, someplace that's like a data center in Rome, we might, that might, get pre-sent to knowing that hey,
Pat: 16:29
All right.
Alex: 16:29
it's a, big Italian language movie. This is likely to be popular here. We'll pre-sent it.
Pat: 16:36
Yeah, that makes sense. So I, so from what I'm hearing is this sort of, and I'm kind of rolling back into the routing days, CDN has a similar flavor of like any cast, right? So you're not going to one to. You're not going to one particular site, you're going to the closest. So for example, Google's dns, quad eights, right? Or, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2. Like, those things don't live in one particular place. They're any casted and they're, they're at multiple places throughout the globe and you just go to the closest one there. Is that a fair comparison as far as like, or are they running a cdn. Type of thing where they're using that service and that's kind of what it is.
Alex: 17:20
There is some many cast, but it's probably not what you think it is. Real. There's these things called traffic controllers. so that's what people are reaching out to originally. So when you're, resolving something and trying to hit play on something for the first time, you're gonna reach out to a traffic controller, and that may be anycast, which means you're gonna log into a closest traffic controller. But all that traffic controller is gonna do is see where you're coming from, is aware of all the CDNs in their current. Utilization and then based on maybe a couple other metrics that are probably pretty obvious when you see them, we'll make a determination where it'll redirect you to, so you reach the traffic controller, the traffic controller's heading back, Hey, go to this guy. Based on everything that I'm paying attention to, it makes most sense that, Hey, you reached out from, The central PA probably makes sense for you to go to Pittsburgh, cuz Philly's hit pretty hard right now or something like that.
Pat: 18:19
Okay, That's interesting.
Alex: 18:22
Yep.
Pat: 18:22
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. I'm, I'm, I'm following you so far, so not a whole lot of smoke over here. Following you so far,
Alex: 18:28
not completely lost yet. Okay. All right. Anything else? And if not, I'll probably go into another topic, which is just kind of like cloud, where this stuff is actually being built today and utilizing those.
Pat: 18:43
Yep. Actually before we do that, would it make sense to just kind of throw some names out there as far as some of the bigger CDN providers, just to say, Hey, if these are a couple of the key players, they're big in the space, and then, that'll resonate with, some folks out there say, oh yeah, my company uses that, or, whatever.
Alex: 19:00
Yeah, there's this little guy I called aws
Pat: 19:03
He's so tiny
Alex: 19:05
Yeah. They just, they run the world. Akamai, if you're not in the it, you might not realize how big Akamai is. Akamai is monstrous. and. don't wanna go as far as, say they have the biggest CDN in the world, but it's close. It's gotta be close.
Pat: 19:18
I would,
Alex: 19:19
if you're talking about just CDN reach globally, it's probably between Verizon, Akamai and AW s. And in the case of Disney, it's no secret they use all of them, to some degree. And yeah. Yeah, those, those are the big players. There's some other smaller ones. Fastly.
Pat: 19:37
CloudFlare is up there as
Alex: 19:40
well. CloudFlare is isn't it bought out by Amazon? Or am I thinking something else?
Pat: 19:46
I think they're standing on their own.
Alex: 19:47
fact. Oh, so that's another, that's another budget thing. We need a fact checker
Pat: 19:53
We get a producer on this show just to talk in our ears while we Now, CloudFlare is up there. Like you said, Fastly is there as well. Amazon, obviously Akamai, Amazon. I think it's called CloudFront, if I'm not
Alex: 20:07
That's why, that's what, that's It's CloudFront. Yeah. So when you said CloudFlare, I was thinking CloudFront. Yeah.
Pat: 20:13
Azure has their own Microsoft Azure, cdn, so there, there's a, there's a few of 'em in the space that really, are some, some heavy hitters. So, yep. Google's another one. Yep.
Alex: 20:22
I'm sure uses their own to service YouTube. I'm sure they're just using their own environment. Yep.
Pat: 20:30
So
Alex: 20:30
so I guess now that we know
Pat: 20:31
there,
Alex: 20:33
yeah, there's options think AWS and Akamai were some of now. it seems like we mentioned earlier that everyone's coming out with their own streaming service. All these other guys that have any type of footprint globally are trying to get into this space. And it's the same kind of setup. It's just they are putting fast storage that can. I mean, they're not, I don't wanna call 'em done, but they're, they're limited in what they do, but they do it well and they can do it in a footprint that's makes it very easy to continue to expand all over the world.
Pat: 21:10
There you
Alex: 21:10
Yeah. So, yeah. So I guess, ha, having said that I wanted to touch a little bit on that and cost the entry for a cdn, or. any type of network. It's, it's the draw with all providers, aws, Google so on and so on, is that there's such an initial investment. You set up your own network or set up your own CDN that I don't see any scenario where somebody who's new to the streaming game, whether it be Disney, a few years back, Hulu. which I realize is owned by Disney now, or any of these smaller like, paramount and, no, there's probably all kinds of other ones,
Pat: 21:50
Discovery plus that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Alex: 21:52
yeah, just things like that. People that have content and then they decide, hey, we have to have some type of streaming offering. Because the initial investment is so heavy, pretty much everyone is utilizing Cloud providers, which is what we all know and understand. But I think the juggernauts, which I'll just focus on, Netflix and Disney have grown so big now where they actually can do this cheaper themselves. So now that there's a, a transition now where now they're trying to get off of Amazon and do it themselves, which is where Netflix is right now. They used to be completely on AWS and now AWS is only used for processing. So just like I mentioned earlier, if you're really talking about content delivery networks, you're really kind of focusing on the edge of that, where people actually pull the content. So as of right now, I don't, maybe they're still servicing it somewhere, but for overwhelming majority of the traffic, it goes to Netflix. You're hitting some data center where they actually own the equipment on site and things like thumbnails that I mentioned earlier. Any of the analytics processing that goes into, producing the results for what it recommends. That's all done with AWS today. And again, they, that's public knowledge. They acknowledge that, but they're transitioning it off. And that's what you're seeing across the board right now because the, the costs associated with some of these juggernauts in Amazon, they're talking about billion dollar.
Pat: 23:24
Oh, I
Alex: 23:25
I mean, to a vendor nine figure bills, yearly bills. So now they're getting to the point where, okay, it makes sense to go on this billion dollar plus investment to build my own cdn. you may not, might take you a year or two, but you know, if you continued growth, yeah, it's only gonna get worse and worse. And the more, the longer you wait, the harder it is to get off. That kind of thing. Yeah. So that. Currently what we're seeing right now is and same with Disney. The idea is they, they, wanna build their own CDNs. They want to get off the dependencies of these CDN providers and do it themselves, and with the ultimate goal to save money.
Pat: 24:03
Yeah. No, I agree a hundred percent. So that kind of brings me to a question that I had once we take a, a breath here. You talked about internet and, sort of the, the nine figure bills that they're, that these streaming giants are pushing, to these vendors and whatnot. Like what does that internet traffic cost look like then as well? I mean, that's gotta be an astronomical bill as far as you. Like, like you're, you're paying, for all that throughput. I mean, that has to be tons and tons of throughput. I would assume that streaming has to be a major percentage of the internet, of the total overall internet traffic out there. I would assume so. Like what does that bill look like from a usage perspective? Boy.
Alex: 24:48
Yeah, for sure. And that, that's why it's so easy to go into things like these Amazon and Google at first, because. Their model, their billing models is based on utilization. So as your utilization goes up, your bill goes up. But again, just like entry in is pretty easy. But yeah. Now as we're transitioning out and all these providers are transitioning out, if you look at the bandwidth statistics of like Netflix and Hulu and Disney it's internet traffic that, a few years back where individual data centers or pops things like a major city is terabytes or terabytes per second of internet
Pat: 25:28
I believe it.
Alex: 25:29
To service all this stuff. And yeah, like you said the, that is a monstrous bill that could be tens of millions of dollars to get all of of these internet circuits. These CDN providers, they're forced to do it. I mean, they have to provide the service to their clients, and that's how they do it over the internet. But a big thing that's a huge push for all these internet providers, or I'm sorry, all these content providers is a concept of private peering. So I think everyone's pretty familiar with you get an internet connection from a big provider. Verizon or CenturyLinks. The other anyone's familiar, the different tiers. Tier one provider are the biggest players and have the biggest reach tier twos the next level down, so on and so on. So again, people are kind of accustomed to that. You buy an internet circuit with 'em, you have internet access and you pay a monthly fee for it. The bigger the circuit, the bigger the, the internet connection, the, and the more costly it is. And at this point with these CDM providers, you're talking about 400 gig circuits and lots of them, so it could get incredibly expensive. But the thing to note is since their content delivery networks uh, then user is what's, just everyone's sitting at their house. That is who is pulling this traffic? That's who the traffic is going to initially. So there's a huge push right now to get in contact with the tier two and tier three internet providers. These are gonna be guys like Spectrum and Charter Crown Castle, cogent. There's several others. They have a really big residential base that is consuming a lot of streaming traffic. YouTube, Netflix, Disney, and the idea is, If people aren't aware, these tier two providers, if they need to reach Disney and they happen to go through a tier one provider, say like Charter in order to get to us, has to go through Verizon. They actually have to pay Verizon to use their network uh, to use them as a transit so that the whole concept between with private peering is you have these big providers, they'll go to these. Still very large ISPs that are residential focused and they'll do something a private peering agreement. The whole idea is we'll connect to each other. I'll only give you my Disney streaming content, which is the only thing that they're concerned about. So I won't use you for anything transit. Like I won't traverse you to reach Verizon. You won't traverse me to use anything else. You'll only use this direct connection to me for streaming. And I. use it again to provide you guys with streaming content and then we won't bill each other for it. So what that turns into is what used to be tens of millions of dollars of internet traffic. Now we can. offload so much of that bandwidth by coming into these agreements with all these big providers. Like I said, crown Castle, cogent charter just any mom and pop internet connection. And it's mutually beneficial. It's like we don't have to pay the tier one providers. They don't have to pair the tier one providers. You're that much closer to our service or latency goes down a little bit. You're cutting out a middle man if troubleshooting is ever necessary and. That's just where it's going. It's so popular to do right now. And and this isn't anything new. Private peering has been something that's been in place for a long time that people do. When it's mutually beneficial to cut out the middleman, private peering is a way to go. It's just now it's a very obvious when you're a big player like Disney, we'll get people reaching out to us. so another concept worth noting is the idea of MeetMe rooms. Just carrier hotels. So when you're coming up with edge sites, or mid-tiers or origin sites, it's beneficial to look for data centers that are considered carrier hotels. It's locations where lots of major players are in and just, we'll take Philadelphia for example, since. pat, you've probably been down there a few times. 4 0 1 North Broad Street. Mm-hmm. that's one of the most, that's a massive carrier hotel on the Northeast there in Philadelphia that every major internet carrier is in that building. They have some type of equipment in there. So because everyone's there generally there is a designated Meet me room, which is just a room that generally has just a few really dumb. And just patch panels. And it provides a very simple way to get connectivity to all these providers. And we utilize that concept when we're picking out data centers and, looking for places that we can get connections other vendors quickly, easily. And, just ends up being how much money is internet bill because, Half your traffic is going to, Comcast Charter, and you can just get those two direct connections for it. It's literally going the, the maintenance fee for like the data center provider to plug in this physical connection might be $250 a month, but they could save you a hundred thousand dollars a month. Just that one connection and you just keep doing that over and over again. It's, as I mentioned earlier, it, it works in many different levels. Just troubleshooting's easier cuz there's one less person to deal with. Just latency is lower because you're not traversing hops, you don't need to. And our bill is much lower and it would be great if we get to the point where these streaming giants become so big that even. The Verizons of the world who kind of felt I think have sat at the top for so long, they might just get to the point where it's like, fine, just connect to us for free because, we have some residential customers, it's like and Yeah, cuz it might just end up turning into a situation where, you know, the, they want the best service for their customers because it's such a draw to have the best possible service. because that's the other thing you can do when you have direct pairings that I didn't go into cuz I didn't want to go overly networking or overly technical. But quality of service Qs that's kind of lost once you start getting into multiple vendors and you get internet. Just cuz no one's gonna care what you what QS stuff you want. you have a direct connection to Comcast and Comcast wants to make sure that. In the event that we blow up one of our backbone connections for something, at least make sure that Disney gets their or make sure Netflix gets their fair share. So that gives you some options that you haven't had before. I think that starts to blur the line and that
Pat: 32:14
That's a good topic
Alex: 32:15
goes on.
Pat: 32:16
No, that's interesting. Cause I knew the meet me rooms and the, the the pairings and whatnot. They've been going on for a few years and just trying to get, closer to your customer and basically like you said, cutting out the middle man and, things of that nature. So I think that's, that's interesting to see that kind of come, to, come to life or at least be a little more, mainstream. And if it's doable then you know, then great. Cuz yeah, obviously that's a ton of traffic that you're pushing and. Anything you can do to get a little closer and, cut down that, that latency and jitter and all that other crazy stuff and, have at it, and they're, they're, they're more than happy to, to do that. Cause that just means better performance, at the, at the end user. So that, that's pretty cool.
Alex: 32:56
Yeah, I agree. So I think that kind of gave a pretty good. Overview of kind of CDNs where they are today, where they're going. In this case we just talked about how they can save some money, so hopefully that's interesting. I was considering going into a bit more detail of like how some of these streaming providers work, but I don't know if it makes sense to get into that much detail. So I guess I'll leave it to you guys. Is there any. Obvious uh, questions that came up that you could think of, anything that you wanted to talk about a little bit more?
Pat: 33:34
Huh. I guess I'm questioning like, okay, say, say I'm here and I and you guys have a, have an edge in Philly. And so I'm, I'm basically going to Philly. Like how do they, is it just, is it just all, obviously it's UDP traffic cuz it's all streaming, but like how does that work with like, is it just a, it's just a copy of whatever. I'm trying to watch. Correct. Like how much, like how, how many cop, for lack of better words, how many copies do y'all keep around it? in particular, is there a limit? Like, is it just, Hey, I, I rented 50,000 copies. If this thing is out, that person's it's gonna be so l like, how does that work?
Alex: 34:14
Well, I think I'll answer your question correctly, but yeah, it kind of goes back to that concept of origin sites where you may only have three sites that have all the data and that data wound up getting copied to maybe middleman data centers that might only hold about half the traffic, and then ultimately to the edge sites that have caching. So I mean,
Pat: 34:34
Hmm.
Alex: 34:35
If you're talking about the, the newest and greatest show, it might be on every single CDN on the planet. I mean, let means just technically at any given time you have a hundred copies of the content. So yeah, not sure if that answered your question or not, but yeah,
Pat: 34:49
how it goes. That's how it rolls. No, that's good. No, I was, I'm always curious about that, Kyle. What?
Kyle: 34:55
So then when it comes to the, the edge sites and stuff like that, when you, you're like the end user and you're, you're reaching out to, to play something, are you just. Getting gigantic files. Are they like little snippets or like, or if you're mobile or something like that. I mean, you're not just getting smacked with huge data. Like you're like, oh, I wanted to watch a movie and I just downloaded four gigs worth of the content. Like,
Alex: 35:19
For sure. Yeah. So these, yeah, a show or even a movie is, it's obviously a, obviously a massive file and it's not realistic for people to download, a what, what's a 20 gig file for maybe a 4K movie? so I talked about a little bit about how there's processing, so this is where it kind of goes away from CDNs a little bit. So cdn, Do what they do. But again, they're not very intelligent, so they don't do any type of processing. They have the content on them and they, people pull the content from them. But when people are actually reaching out to view a movie or view a show, what they're, what they end up doing is, They reach out to something and they get a manifest file, and what that manifest file is is like a list of URLs and each one of those URLs actually points back to. Very specific chunk of content. So I probably should have started off by saying when you get these massive files like a movie you'll actually, when they're processed, that generally well Netflix case, it's an aws or whatever data center that's doing this processing, they'll take that file that might be 90 minutes long and turn it into thousands of five second clips. What that allows you to do is when the player, whether it be, and not only do I should back up again, again, not only will they break it up in the five second chunks, they'll also break it up in the five different chunks at different bit rates. That'll all go to like what your bandwidth is. If you're rocking a 3G connection somewhere, you might get the 360 p version of it. And if you're, even if you're a mobile device it'll default to probably not giving you the 4K content, even if you technically the 4K phone, just cuz it's hard to tell a difference. It might default to a seven 20 p content, which is much less bandwidth. Yeah. But the whole idea is it has these five second chunks, it all different bit rates, each one of those chunks and bit rates will have some type of URL that gets you access to them. So say you're on a phone, you're at a decent connection, maybe you. I don't know, say five. Make connection, not quite enough to download best content available. I'll go back to those traffic controllers I talked about. Again, those traffic controllers will be able to see what your connection speeds are at, and then, based on that, not only direct you to the right cdn, which could, which will probably be nearby, but they'll direct you to the CDN and the specific URLs, the specific manifest files that will give you the content at the bit rate that they think is acceptable. So what you end up doing as the end user device is you're downloading maybe 15 seconds of content at a time that gets cashed on your device. That's, that 15 seconds is very small in the grand scheme of things. And if you ever look at your, if you look at a PC and you're steaming something, you'll actually see your temp files constantly churning because it's pulling these five second content might download three of 'em. It's cashing it, and really fast memory. And then as soon as it's done with it, it deletes it and goes over and over and over again. So even though it might be a 20 gig file, you probably only need to at any given point, store a few megs worth of it. It turns into like, 10, 15 seconds of it. So
Kyle: 38:40
Really awesome.
Alex: 38:41
that's kind of how it works.
Pat: 38:43
That is awesome man. This is such cool stuff. just it's crazy. Who doesn't love this stuff? It's my question. Who doesn't love it? Did you wanna touch on anything else before we go into some of the futuristic, putting our, putting our not our tinfoil hat, but you know, something in the future hat on and seeing where that goes.
Alex: 39:02
Ah, don't wanna give people too much. So I think that's a good overview. If they want more, maybe we can do a follow up,
Pat: 39:08
if you want more, hit us up. Let us know If that's something you're into. We can really get into the weeds and, I dunno, maybe Alex, you can bring one of your really smart friends on and that, that deals with this a little way more than than even just the surface that, that we're doing it and have 'em come on and nerd out even harder. This is awesome,
Alex: 39:26
Sounds good.
Pat: 39:27
So where do you see the future of streaming slash CDNs going? Because they're, they're obviously here, they've been around for a while. I think late nineties is CDNs started in like the late nineties, I wanna say somewhere around there. And they were just a way to deliver like static H T M L pages faster to. To people and it's kind of evolved over, over time. And here we are now, we're now we're pushing terabytes of data through this thing. So where do you see it going?
Alex: 39:57
there's a few things. I'm really interested to see how gaming might take advantage of CDNs. I know was it stadia?
Pat: 40:05
Yeah,
Alex: 40:06
Google's gaming. So I'm kind of curious how they'll do that. Because there's so many things that are, sure they're similar, but they're fundamentally different. You can't buffer for 15 seconds when you're playing a first person shooter. So I am curious if they come up with like, just gaming that's streamed, you don't have a, a console. How CDNs. right now I kept saying that CDNs are kind of dumb. They service content, but maybe there'll be a slight evolution where this, in addition to serving content, they can also do some basic processing that's related to gaming, where it's so yeah, interested with that. the other things that come to mind that. people are doing a lot of right. Uh, the streaming giants evolve analytics and some of the things that they're doing are are really interesting. Cuz when you're talking about these massive streaming giants that the, small things that they're doing analytics wise, cause they have so much data I think it'd be great to see how much impact they're having. And one example I'll give and. For Netflix and maybe you don't know this but when you're cycling through Netflix, see a thumbnail for every show. You know, you're cycling through it, You see a little thumbnail about it. For every show, there will be at least three or four iterations of that thumbnail, and in some cases considerably more, and they'll modify that thumbnail based on your viewing. And one clear cut example I'll give is um, cause I was just reading this the other day, is Goodwill Hunting. Great movie. Matt Damon, Ronnie Williams. But if they say you see that you have a tendency to referring a certain actor, be it Matt Damon, be it Rob Williams, a thumbnail that you'll have will make sure that Rob Williams or Matt Damon's on it. If you don't like either but you like romantic movies, you'll get a thumbnail where Matt Damon is kiss. What's Mini Driver is that her name, the Female Lead. So to like a romantic movie, if you have a tendency to prefer comedies, you'll see the scene where Robin Williams and Matt Damon are cracking up over something. They're both just have huge fo if you prefer dramas, you'll see one where the two are embracing like a very serious moment. And I thought that was so interesting. The other example they gave was stranger Things. If you have a tendency to. Horror or or maybe more mature content, you'll get a much darker image. Whereas if you tend to have more family friendly content, you'll actually get a picture of the four kids.
Pat: 42:48
Huh? Look at
Kyle: 42:49
that's wild.
Alex: 42:51
and I just, when I was reading that article, I thought to myself that it seems so simple given you have this data of trends that people have, and I think that would have a profound impact on what people. because I, I can, I know it has with me things that I'm not familiar with. That thumbnail immediately peaks my interest one way or another.
Pat: 43:12
that's interesting. I just wanna know where can I get a thumbnail of a Bigfoot show that I wanna watch How many, yeah, how many thumbnails of Bigfoot can I get? The one that I really, really like? Is that out there? Could somebody tell me?
Alex: 43:27
on Hulu, they're searching for Bigfoot documentary. I watched that. That's pretty
Pat: 43:31
love it. I love. Bigfoot and UFOs. C Can I get,
Kyle: 43:34
Yes,
Pat: 43:35
can I get an alien one, like four different iterations of aliens? I'm in there.
Alex: 43:41
so think about that next time you go to Netflix is think of the stuff that you like in your case if you like UFOs, and then maybe look at content and you'd be surprised how many of the thumbnails are focused on what you like.
Pat: 43:54
See now I can't. That's gonna be something I can't unsee from now on. Now you've said that I'll just be like, God damn big brother Jesus. They're always trying to get us to buy more that is wild.
Alex: 44:06
that's just Netflix and I'll let you guys bring up anything if you think of it. But Disney's doing something similar where if you go to the parks now you get wristband that kind of keeps track. Rides that you ride and the places that you eat. But the whole idea is they wanna keep, they want to create an ecosystem, like a, a system where they're streaming their theater experiences and their park experiences are all combined together. So what they'll end up doing is if they see you've gone to the Guardians, the Galaxy Ride, while you were. Now, next time you go on to Disney Plus, it'll start suggesting the cards. The Galaxy trilogy.
Pat: 44:50
That's time to be alive. God damn
Kyle: 44:56
Wow.
Alex: 44:57
Yeah. So, and they, it works the opposite way too. If they see that you tend to watch a lot of Star Wars stuff when you go to the park and you have the wristband or you have the companion. It'll actually suggest, Hey, this Ride and Galaxy's Edge, the Star wars attraction, this ride's got a short weight
Pat: 45:17
There you go. Look at that. Look at that fun fact. The wife and the family and I are going to Disney in December, right before Christmas. So yeah, the wife's best friend, her son plays in a middle school band, and they got invited down to Disney. So they're going, so we're all going, I think it's right before December. And also I'll say this publicly. The wife downloaded an app today that tracks how many days we have left to Disney. I dunno how I feel about that so far. I'm She's like, Hey, there's two heart and 63 days, and 11 hours, 47 minutes till we hit Disney. I'm like, thanks for that reminder, honey. Appreciate it.
Alex: 45:58
I'll one nerd you
Pat: 45:59
Oh.
Alex: 45:59
Uh, my wife, my wife's a programmer. We're going to Disney in april. She created a website a ticker of when we leave.
Pat: 46:07
that's some next level stuff right there. I love
Kyle: 46:10
It's amazing.
Pat: 46:11
it. But I'll tell you what, the wife and I went Disney on our honeymoon before we had kids, and Disney is just as much fun for adults as it is for kids. I'll tell you that right now. And that.
Alex: 46:22
Oh, yeah. The most fun you can have is not
Pat: 46:24
oh my. Oh, it's amazing. And let me tell you, that avatar ride that they have down there in Florida, that is the best ride I have ever, ever, ever been on. So if anybody's listening out there
Alex: 46:36
in Animal Kingdom.
Pat: 46:37
the one that, yeah, the one in Animal King that was brand new. Right when we, like when we got there, it was literally less than six months old and we literally got off the plane onto the. Bus or whatever it is. The, the, the bus that that p from the airport got on that bus. Our first day was at Animal Kingdom and our first fast pass, which I don't think they do fast passes anymore, but at the time they did the Fast Pass, the, our first fast pass was for that ride and literally we were, I was like, I got off that ride and I was like, this vacation could be over right this minute cuz that was the best ride I could ever been on. It was
Alex: 47:12
it's funny you mentioned that. That is, that's the thing I'm looking forward to the most in the whole, the troll trip. We're gonna be there April 15th. It's Pandora's flight, I'm sure is what you're talking about, in Animal Kingdom. So yeah, I'm going
Pat: 47:26
It's so good. It's so, we did it twice. That's how good it was. We had fast passes for both and I was like, this is this is the most boss ride ever. Like, holy. Oh my God, it's amazing. And of course, in true Disney fashion, at the end of the ride, you lo you walk out of the building, you lo down this long corridor or whatever, and it drops you in into a gift shop. So Disney never misses an opportunity to sell you something
Alex: 47:49
know. they know what they're doing.
Pat: 47:51
Hannah. Yes, they do. So, yeah, so, if you love the avatar ride as much as I did, hit me up on Twitter, let's talk about it. Cuz I, I can't, I can't get enough, I can't, I can't find people that like it, like as much as I did. It is, it was, it was awesome. I loved it. Every, every minute in Disney was great. So, yeah. So, where, where, where are you staying in Disney, Alex?
Alex: 48:12
I am staying at one of the resorts, but it's one of the real cheaper ones animation so I'm not doing it cuz my kids are older now, but, so was one of the cheaper ones. But yeah. Animal Kingdom on April 14th. and Epcot on Saturday at 15th. And yeah, I already have a list of all the rides.
Pat: 48:31
Epcot was
Alex: 48:32
cuz I, I live, I live real close to Anaheim, like 10 minutes from Anaheim, so I can go to Disneyland anytime I want. And there's, at Disneyland, there's two parks. There's Disneyland and California Adventure and there's two parks. of the four in Disney World that are very similar to those two. So Animal Kingdom and epcot are the two that are unlike the two in here in Anaheim. So those are the two we're going to.
Pat: 48:56
Animal Kingdom ended up being my favorite park, to be honest. It was awesome. I loved it. It was great. So yeah, so just an interesting note on that one. But, yeah, man, we're, we'll, we'll be there in December and we'll see what kind of mess we can make with two kids now. So it's a
Alex: 49:11
Oh yeah. And then we'll have to let people know how our Disney plus was
Pat: 49:17
That's right.
Alex: 49:17
it. See
Kyle: 49:18
Yeah,
Alex: 49:19
start getting avatar
Pat: 49:20
it. Maybe just from this conversation they'll start popping up cuz they're listening all the time. Who knows? We'll see what happens.
Alex: 49:27
Yep. That's the world we live in. I already got four emails.
Pat: 49:31
So, uh, anything else boys, before we wrap up and get outta here? We're right around that hour mark, which is which is our sweet spot.
Alex: 49:38
No, I think we're good. Hope people got some out of that. Maybe after the recording is stopped, we'll talk more about Disney World, but people don't need to hear about that.
Pat: 49:48
If you wanna hear more about us talking about Disney world, let us know. We'll certainly sit here and throw a few high points in. no, that, that's, that's gonna be it. this was awesome. Great discussion on CDNs and kind of what they bring to the world. So thanks again for joining this week on Breaking Down the Bites. Actually visit our website, breaking bys pod.io. That's where you can subscribe to the show, on your favorite platform of choice. Most of you come from Apple Podcast, formerly known as iTunes. that's what our stats tell us anyway. So there's a link for that. Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher. Or if you just need a RSS feed, that's up there as well. So you don't miss a show, right? Throw us a rating on Apple Podcasts. That'd be awesome. Simply tell a friend. That's cool too. We've, gotten some really good feedback lately and we're tweaking as necessary. So e e every bit of feedback really does help. Kind of you. Guide these shows and get you what you want to hear. So, awesome there too. Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, discord server. The survey that we have out there, the feedback survey, it's all in the show notes for your platform of choice for socials. So, all right, fellas. It's been a good one. Awesome, awesome time and we'll see everybody again next week. Bye everybody.
Kyle: 50:59
So long.
Alex: 51:00
Two.