Apple’s CDN Now Live: Has Paid Deals With ISPs, Massive Capacity In Place | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s CDN Now Live: Has Paid Deals With ISPs, Massive Capacity In Place

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65 pointsghshephard51 comments

What amazes me is that Apple's infrastructure has markedly improved over the past few years. I haven't noticed as many Mobile Me/iTools-era sluggishness or flakiness since at least a couple years ago. And I've yet to get on an internet connection that isn't saturated by a download from Apple.com or a related service. Not to say Apple's perfect, but whatever changes they made after all the Mobile Me fiascos seem to be helping.

I've noticed the exact opposite.

It can take 15 seconds for my iPad to connect to the store over wifi. Similar results on my Windows desktop and my Apple laptop.

A download will fail at least a third of the time. If I'm downloading more than one thing, or the download is large, say a movie, I almost always have to restart the download.

Television shows continually reset themselves as unwatched, or split themselves into two seasons.

Items that are downloaded to the computers or devices suddenly make themselves "unavailable" and have to be downloaded again.

Any chance you're using third-party DNS servers and not your ISP's?

Funny you mention that. I had awful service with AT&T's DNS servers. After I switched to using Google's everything's run as quick as a button.

Not using your ISP's DNS can confound CDNs. In particular, I had to revert to my ISP's DNS servers from Google's specifically because my AppleTV was unable to stream movies otherwise. This was when Google DNS first launched, but you might give it a shot.

I happen to have a router running dnsmasq, so I could use different upstream DNS servers depending upon the query (i.e. route CDN domain queries to my ISP and everything else to Google), but I found it not worth the trouble. TWC's DNS isn't that bad... I do override their search page for non-existant domains with NXDOMAIN however.

That's useful information that I didn't know. Thanks for sharing.

This is why anycast is better than DNS for cdn, IMHO :)

How easy is it to set up any cast as opposed to geo-DNS routing?

That's exactly the reason I haven't switched away from my ISP's DNS because some services do run significantly better over my ISP's DNS instead of the non-ISP ones.

No. I am using my ISP's DNS servers obtained through DHCP.

Also I have no problems with YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon instant video, etc.

EDIT: Before anybody suggests that I try different DNS servers, I have.

iMessage is still terrible. Messages don't make it to their destination, images fail to send properly, messages are duplicated.

I've never experienced this. Sounds like a general network issue, not an iMessage issue. Junk network equipment at home? Badly oversubscribed LTE/3g in your area?

Never had this problem, and with one exception everyone I text with has an iPhone.

To the people saying this is not a problem, it is. In particular, iMessage seems to often get confused when trying to send a picture. The progress bar will get to half or even mostly full, and then just pause ...forever.

It's not a connection issue. On several occasions after running into this iMessage issue, I have emailed the picture full-res without problems.

That said, I don't think iMessage is terrible. I love it when it works as expected.

In my experience, SMS is still many times worse. Long messages arrive out of order and parts sometimes do not arrive at all. I've had messages to friends on AT&T delivered 36 hours late, causing confusion.

iMessage, on the other hand, has mandatory delivery confirmation (so you can at least know if a message is going to be problematic) and optional read receipts.

Is SMS really that bad in the states? It works pretty flawlessly in the UK.

Yes. It's why iMessage exists (and was welcomed with open arms) in the first place.

Odd, in the UK I get almost 100% success - plus you get the handy delivered (and optionally read) notifications.

Never had such problems. I use it both from desktop and my phone, works just fine.

> I've yet to get on an internet connection that isn't saturated by a download from Apple.com

This year Apple has usually maxed out at 20-30 Mbyte/s instead of the 100+ Mbyte/s I get from some servers.

Move to KC — we also have great BBQ!

A few days ago (when this actually launched), I was in a position where I actually had to map out their network some. The CDN nodes are all 17.253.*.22[1-4], and are located in Los Angeles (22), Chicago (12), Palo Alto (? this one I found confusing and also thought might be near New Jersey) (18), Dallas (8), Miami (6), Atlanta (4), New York (2), Seattle (20), San Jose (16), the Netherlands (32), the UK (34), Austria (66), Hong Kong (64), Japan (68), Singapore (80), and Germany (48).

Could someone explain to me what the deal with the ISPs would look like? What does the deal accomplish? I don't understand because I think the content would always have to come from their CDN if that's where it's hosted. Are the deals meant to ensure the shortest trajectory to their CDN network?

It can even mean that Apple has hardware in the ISP's POP, so there are no hops between the ISP and Apple's hardware -- a direct connection, if you will.

ISPs will degrade the requests of their customers if the requested service doesn't pay a toll (see Netflix for an example). Apple has agreed to pay many major ISPs so that Apple's bits don't get stuck in the slow lane. It's pretty shameful that this is required, but that's how it is these days.

Don't spread bullshit.

Can you clarify? The GP seems to accurately describe the current regulatory scheme.

Are the deals meant to ensure the shortest trajectory to their CDN network?

Yes, more or less. Traffic can flow Apple->some backbone->Comcast or Apple->Comcast. The latter path is less congested.

I think this is long overdue. Sometimes Apple are really conservatives with these kind of infrastructure things. Like building enough Datacenter for their iCloud Services.

It cant be hard for Apple to build a CDN of its own when they have a worldwide reach in Mobile Network, and most Mobile Network are owned by a Local Telecom ISP.

I hope their next Keynote will be running on their own CDN.

I find it strange for Apple, since they are an early investor and customer in Akamai.

It's the difference between strategy and strategy tax. Tim Cook won't pay a cent more than he has to for anything, even to his best friend.

It's pure speculation, but I still believe they have something up their sleeve to make use of all this bandwidth / data center space. Hopefully we'll see something soon.

The article mentions Apple still hasn't moved over iTunes (store, movie, music, Match) or Radio service traffic, among other things (those are still on Akamai/Level3). I'm sure Apple's planning on moving at least some of these services over to their new CDN.

A CDN like this would be really helpful for that streaming service they're probably working on.

Which streaming service? They bought one this year along with really expensive headphones.

I was being general, but yes, I'm going to go ahead and say their acquisition of Beats may be a leading cause of Apple upping their CDN power, but who knows.

iTunes Match is fast for me. And alot was stuff it didn't match and uploaded from me (which is odd because they sell some of it now. I bought the classical music direct).

I can download and play at work almost instantaneously.

uploading this to match was not fun.. http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/cat/4778167

If you are big enough, at some point it doesn't make sense to pay people to be your CDN.

Expect a NetFlix competitor, and a TV competitor.

That's my thought too.

iTunes?

...then expect Netflix-like problems with big ISPs?

True. This has to do more with knowing and understanding (and being able to control) your traffic and content patterns rather than simply being big. When part of your business is making recommendations to people on what they should watch (listen to) next, content propagation and pre-caching is a no-brainer.

Does this affect AppleTV any?

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/apples..., which points to this.

When changing a URL, wouldn't it be fair to check first if the same URL was submitted before? I submitted the now linked URL about 3 hours ago.

HN does not care about crediting the first submitter of a link. If you're in it for the karma, submitting links is a waste of time.

It arguably would be fairer, but solving that problem is trickier than it sounds, especially in HN's current system—where, for example, post rank decays rapidly with time.

It's largely random which version of a story ends up making the front page. We're working on that, but our driving concern is not who the submitter is, but improving the story quality of the front page. So for the foreseeable future, it will still be a lottery who gets the credit/karma for submitting a story. The best way to win the lottery is to enter it often with high-quality submissions.

The problem here is that the Ars article was better. It was better written and had additional information.

The original article was poorly written and harder to follow.

I would arguably say you made the front page worse by switching the link.

I'm surprised you would say that. The Ars piece consists nearly entirely of quotes from this one.

The current article may not be well-written, but its claim to primacy is obvious. I have a hard time justifying massively lifted content on the HN front page.

There's a difference between lifting content and journalism. :)

Ars practices journalism, which means they take a primary source and then enrich it with useful information while also making it easier to understand.

You're absolutely right in that many blogs simply regurgitate someone else's content, but Ars is not one of those sites.

If you want to be heavy handed in your moderation and become a content curator, you'll need to get better at distinguishing the two.

this is one of the reasons we shied away from heavy handed moderation at reddit -- it's just too difficult to do it well.

Also, primacy doesn't always mean it is better.

That is an... idiosyncratic... definition of "journalism".

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