Optimizing your multi-CDN infrastructure to improve performance

A multi-CDN strategy delivers the key benefit of redundancy - or a diversification of risk; with multiple content delivery networks in play, an organization can strategically route delivery paths to sidestep outages, bypass local bottlenecks, and deliver content quickly and with the highest fidelity, thereby reducing the associated risks and costs of downtime. When an organization runs its multi-CDN infrastructure efficiently and effectively, it can guarantee uptime and can deliver content via the fastest possible route to their customers.

In our recent paper Optimizing a Multi-CDN Infrastructure for Performance, we provide insight into how optimizing your multi-CDN infrastructure strategically can yield enormous performance benefits across your org and for your customers. So, whether your organization currently operates on a multi-CDN architecture, or you’re considering adopting it, you can use this whitepaper to evaluate your current architecture and learn how Fastly could be your strategic partner for yielding performance gains.

Making Multi-CDNs work for you

Multi-CDN can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be! The ‘why nots’ of a multi-CDN architecture include:

• Increased complexity

• Multiple vendors

• Cost implications of poor management... And more!

While these can seem prohibitive, they are all easily overcome with the right strategic partner and strategy in place.

Are you missing out on performance benefits?

Often, we find customers lowering traffic allocations or making misinformed decisions based on misconfigurations or bad data. This results in unnecessary and costly alterations to their delivery strategy. We see customers mistakenly identifying performance degradations where there are none - from errors in reporting on poor telemetry. 

Ultimately, without a complete handle on your architecture (or a partnership with someone who CAN manage it), you are doing your organization a great disservice from a performance and cost savings perspective - ask yourself, does your org have a strong grasp on:

1. The complexity of multiple CDNs?

2. Config errors? 

3. Required technical expertise? 

If not, a partnership with Fastly might be the answer…

The Fastly edge

Fastly is uniquely equipped to serve as your strategic partner in optimizing your multi-CDN architecture for performance. All of our largest customers are multi-CDN; over the years, we’ve found they often lack a strategy for how to measure their CDNs’ performance, and how to allocate traffic across different CDNs. We have successfully partnered with many of them, yielding enormous performance benefits.

CDN Chaining

If your organization has a multi-CDN strategy, you can still significantly reduce your egress cost and origin load by placing a CDN with great request collapsing capabilities between your origin and other CDNs.

You should consider placing a single CDN (like Fastly) between other CDNs and your origins to effectively work as a single large shield for your origin. This is called CDN “chaining”. By tackling your multi-CDN architecture with a go-between CDN you can enjoy enhanced observability. The intermediary CDN and its associated support teams can help serve as a buffer for issues and provide insight into your entire ecosystem.

Fastly Media Shield

Fastly’s Media Shield mirrors your origin server, taking all requests from the multiple CDNs in your architecture, and serving (responding to) all requests from cache. Essentially, it blocks your origin from being overloaded by redundant requests or an onslaught of requests during traffic surges. Media Shield collapses like requests into a single request to help with origin offload.

Think of this service quite literally as a shield; Fastly helps to protect you and your origin, keeping you up and running smoothly. And this shielding yields big savings: our recent origin offload report shows how “A 5% improvement in CDN offload performance can mean a 50% load reduction at origin”. From only a slight offload improvement, you could be saving a ton of time and money.

Event calendar with Fastly 

At Fastly we carry massive percentages of large event traffic, across the globe. This means we have incredible insight into current and upcoming events, with the capability to predict poor or overloaded days for content delivery. We host events so large that they have regional effects - and we want to be able to educate the market on this! We can offer a consultative role in event planning with our internal blackout calendar.

Creating a Multi-CDN Strategy

Without the required technical expertise, internal resources, and bandwidth, navigating a multi-CDN infrastructure alone is making organizations lose out on precious performance optimization benefits. Partnering with a strategic partner, like Fastly, can help unravel the complexity of managing multiple vendors. Our position as a trusted player and adviser in the space can help you feel secure in your journey to optimizing performance - let us help you, help yourself!