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Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree that the network effect in CDNs is so huge. Instead of consolidating, I think the CDN market is slowly fracturing. 10 years ago, there was only one workable CDN for most: Akamai (founded 1998). Now there is Cloudfront (launched 2008), Cloudflare (founded 2009), Fastly (founded 2011) and a long tail of others. It takes some years for a new CDN to sign big corporate contracts but the trend seems to be toward more CDNs and a number have been founded recently.

It is easier than ever for them to get started because they can begin by piggybacking on one of the existing CDNs. Eventually they will build their own network of POPs (local caches). I also don't think you need as many POPs now to build a saleable CDN as in the past - there is some fraction of the market for which as low as 5 POPs might be ok.

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There may be more CDNs but most of them aren't that great…

CloudFront has HTTP/2 prioritisation, and concatenation issues

Many of the others build on nginx which also has HTTP/2 prioritisation issues

Akamai, Cloudflare & Fastly seem to be the only CDNs that are seriously investing in their infrastructure and their platform — all use custom edge server software (yes some of it forked from open source), have built in image optimisation services, have ability to run workloads on the edge etc.

Then there's the peering arrangements that have to be negotiated (and paid for if you're not pushing significant traffic)

Conversely, the usage of CDNs has increased since the 'Akamai-only' days. Case in point: The vast population of WordPress and other web applications wouldn't generally use Akamai in the 2000s, however, today CDN usage is more commonplace.

> It is easier than ever for them to get started because they can begin by piggybacking on one of the existing CDNs. Eventually they will build their own network of POPs

This increases centrality, as the point of failure is the parent CDN.

Agreed - the usage has risen hugely but that doesn't mean that it won't continue to fracture. The barriers to entry in running a CDN are not enormous and lots of startups are able to enter.

> This increases centrality, as the point of failure is the parent CDN.

Only for a while, as they are starting up

Creating POPs is not as trivial as creating a Heroku or Render like service on top of public clouds. While there are EC2s and public cloud VMs in various geographically distributed locations around the world, the instances in the actual POP regions are usually inaccessible.

Example:

- AWS has 25 regions [0]

- AWS CloudFront has 225 POP regions [1]

Partnering with Equinix/etc. and other ISPs to establish more POPs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Unless the CDN has a good edge-close-to-cities presence and a high number of those, users will generally not see value in the CDN.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/?nc=sn&loc=2&what...

> Creating POPs is not as trivial as creating a Heroku or Render like service on top of public clouds.

I didn't claim that it was.

> Unless the CDN has a good edge-close-to-cities presence and a high number of those, users will generally not see value in the CDN.

A home truth is that most CDN users don't give a monkeys about per-city POPs. If you just had one POP per continent that would probably be sufficient to cut latency by ~75% for cache hits. Many real world CDNs have <50 POPs (eg CDN77, which has 33) and some have <25 (eg BunnyCDN sells a package with just 8 POPs). These businesses have already existed for some years and have a real customer bases.

Sorry it was ambiguous. By “users”, we mean the business buyers of the CDN service. Eg: As a developer, I don’t know where exactly my users are, if thus I was spending the same, then I would rationally prefer a CDN which has more POPs than one which has fewer.

It wasn't ambiguous, I meant buyers.

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